2025 Tenuta Tre Gemme Terroir Line Passerina Abruzzo

Passerina is named after sparrows — "passero" is Italian for the bird — because its tiny, sweet, thin-skinned berries were historically a favorite snack for flocks that would descend on the vines before harvest. It's one of the rarer, more obscure white grapes in Italy, grown almost nowhere outside a small pocket of Abruzzo and Marche, with murky origins that ampelographers still argue about. If you haven't heard of it, that's exactly the point — this is a genuine curiosity, not a mass-market grape.

Tenuta Tre Gemme grows theirs on the same organically farmed hillside land the estate has worked for generations. Founder Don Rocco Perrucci's family has farmed this ground in Catignano, Abruzzo, since the early 1800s, and today his daughters Carla and Anna Perrucci run the estate — 70 hectares split across two adjoining plots in the Terra dei Vestini, a subzone named for the Vestini, an ancient Italic tribe who lived in these hills long before Rome. The estate's own name, Tre Gemme, honors a thousand-year-old carved shrine found at the property's edge, its three gems said to represent intellect, heart, and earth.

Passerina thrives at real elevation here, between 350 and 450 meters, in the wide gap between hot days and cool nights that runs through this whole stretch of Abruzzo — conditions that keep this naturally high-yielding grape lively and fresh instead of flat and simple, which is exactly the trap most versions of Passerina fall into.

After that they leave it alone. Stainless steel, a short soak on the skins to pull the aromatics out, and three months in bottle. No oak at any point.

Serve it cold, with anything that came out of the sea.