The ‘Ode’ occupies CantineArte’s ‘workhorse’ space as the cantina’s most abundant and approachable Montepulciano wine. A wine that is always good on day one and most often better on day two (a welcome surprise for a variety that often seems to put most of its better cards on the table right out of the gate), its freshness ‘afterburners’ demonstrate how picking prioritized to the earlier side of the season, along with rigorous sorting, avoids any sense of desiccation or oxidative notes in the spectrum of Montepulciano fruit - a concern often found in young wines from these sunnier parts of Italy. Minerally, cool and refreshing, the Ode offers ethereal aromatic qualities of black cherry skin and pit, fig leaf and camphor, on top of its naturally savory earthiness. The wine is more straightforward in winemaking approach, with stainless steel fermentations (10-12 days) and aging (12 months), and is void of any tweaks that might make it feel heavy-handed. Rather, a reliance on excellent and conscious organic farming with a clear eye for nuance and detail, and of course, the joy of the people behind it seem to render a wine of high pleasure.
CantinArte is the unification of two Abruzzesi families from very different corners of one of Italy’s most geologically and topographically diverse Italian departments - Abruzzo. Francesca Di Nosio and her husband Diego began their wine adventure in 2007 with a relatively small Montepulciano vineyard previously owned by Francesca’s grandmother, Maria, located inside the province of Chieti, a mere ten kilometers from the Adriatic Sea. The couple’s soft sloping southeast-exposed vines grow in deep sand-affected clay and produce balanced, bright and snappy red-fruited wines. By contrast, the pair’s white grapes (of which I encourage you to seek out on our shelves) grow high in the mountains of Diego’s familial province, about an hour’s drive east of their home village of Bucchianico. A wife and busy mother of two (on top of her winery and vineyard work), a trip to UC Davis in the late 1980s with her father, followed by a year-long apprenticeship at the biodynamic Chianti Classico cantina, Querciabella in Greve in Chianti, laid the groundwork for a passion for wine and farming that has led Francesca to her position as one of Abruzzo’s guiding lights in pursuit of balance and soulfulness in a region often lacking plenty of both.