2025 Tenuta Tre Gemme Terroir Line Pecorino Abruzzo

Pecorino almost didn't survive to be in your glass. This grape — nothing to do with the cheese, just an old shared name — was farmed down to near-nothing by the mid-20th century, considered too low-yielding and unfashionable to bother with, until a handful of stubborn growers in the 1980s tracked down surviving vines on remote mountain slopes and started replanting. Some locals mocked it as "cheese wine." Plantings sat at just 87 hectares across Abruzzo and Marche in the year 2000 — by 2010, that number had jumped to nearly 1,450, as winemakers and drinkers alike realized what they'd almost lost.

Tenuta Tre Gemme grows their Pecorino on the same organic hillside land the estate has farmed for generations. The estate was founded by Don Rocco Perrucci, a Catignano landowner whose family has worked this ground since the early 1800s; his daughters, Carla and Anna Perrucci, now run the property, 70 hectares across two adjoining plots in the Terra dei Vestini — a subzone named for the Vestini, an ancient Italic tribe who lived here well before Rome. The estate's own name, Tre Gemme, comes from a thousand-year-old carved shrine of St. Anne and the Madonna child discovered on the property's border.

This one comes off the highest ground they own, at 450 metres above Civitaquana, on pebbly limestone. That's the coolest corner of the estate, which matters for a grape that ripens as fast as this one does.

The winemaking is deliberately plain. Stainless steel, a soak on the skins to get the aromatics out, then a few months in bottle. Nothing sees oak.

If you've never had Pecorino, this is a fair place to find out what the fuss is about.