De Fermo

The People

Eloisa De Fermo grew up around this land. Her family has farmed it, quietly, for roughly 250 years, not as winemakers, but the way much of the Abruzzo countryside has always been farmed. Stefano Papetti Ceroni grew up in Bologna and met Eloisa while they were both studying law at university there. He first saw the De Fermo property in 2007 and was struck by it immediately: the old vines, the soils, the altitude, the way the land sat right on the hill. It stayed with him.

Two years later, in 2009, he and Eloisa made the decision that reshaped both their lives: they left their legal careers behind for good and moved to Abruzzo to run the place themselves. There was no easing in. They converted the entire estate to biodynamic growing from the very first day, with no conventional transition period at all, and had their first vintage ready by 2010, barely a year after arriving. Today the two divide the work along familiar lines: Stefano leads the winemaking and commercial direction, bringing an outsider's rigour a tradition-bound family might lack, while Eloisa runs the agronomic and farm-management side of what is, deliberately, a much bigger project than a vineyard. The estate still carries her family's name.

The Land

Loreto Aprutino is a fortified medieval hill town in Pescara province, long a centre of Abruzzese winegrowing, and De Fermo sits on its highest ground, between 270 and 320 metres above sea level. Rosenthal Wine Merchant, the estate's respected US importer, has called this patch of hillside "among the best terroirs in all of Abruzzo": stony, well-drained soil at altitude, giving the fruit a thermal swing between day and night that keeps freshness in the grapes.

Vines are only one part of what's actually here. The farm covers roughly 200 hectares in total, and just 17 of them are planted with grapes: 10 hectares of Montepulciano, 3.5 of Pecorino, a block Stefano keeps expanding as it's become his favourite, 2.5 of Chardonnay, and under one hectare of Trebbiano d'Abruzzo. The other 180-odd hectares are olive groves, 20 hectares of them, vegetable plots, legumes, pasture, and grazing cattle. Stefano and Eloisa treat that mix as essential to the wine, not a lifestyle flourish: their theory is that a genuinely diverse, living farm builds healthier soil and better fruit than a vineyard planted in isolation.

How They Work

The whole 200-hectare farm is certified biodynamic, a step beyond organic farming that treats the entire property as one living system. Preparations made from things like composted manure are worked into the soil on a schedule tied to the lunar calendar, and the estate lets spontaneous vegetation grow between the vine rows instead of keeping bare, tilled soil, on the theory that richer plant and microbial life underground makes for healthier vines. It's certified through ICEA and AgriBio, and De Fermo also belongs to Renaissance des Appellations, an association founded by the French winemaker Nicolas Joly that only admits biodynamic producers who meet strict standards, alongside estates like Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Joly's own Coulée de Serrant.

Most Abruzzo growers train their vines on pergolas, tall, overhead canopies that spread the vine wide and push yields up. De Fermo instead uses cordon royat, a low, tightly spur-pruned system more associated with quality-focused estates in Burgundy and the Rhône. It sharply limits how much fruit each vine can carry, meaning smaller berries with a higher proportion of skin to juice, and more concentrated, expressive wine, a deliberate trade of yield for intensity that sets De Fermo apart from its neighbours.

In the cellar, the same restraint carries through. Fermentation runs on wild yeast naturally present on the grapes, using whole grape bunches rather than pre-crushed fruit, with no temperature control, and sulfur, the standard preservative in winemaking, kept to a minimum. Wines go into large old Austrian oak casks known as Stockinger botti, smaller tonneaux, and concrete, unfiltered: there's no stainless steel anywhere in the range. Even the oak isn't there for flavour. Casks this large and old add almost no wood character, so their real job is slow oxygen exchange, not shaping the wine with new wood.

The Wines

Prologo is the flagship: a structured, ageworthy Montepulciano d'Abruzzo built to stand alongside Italy's classic reds, aged in those large Stockinger casks. The name means "prologue," suggesting the estate sees it as the opening chapter of a longer argument for the grape, and it's been called one of the more serious Montepulciano d'Abruzzo bottlings being made today.

Concrete is its lighter sibling: the same Montepulciano, but aged in concrete rather than wood, made to show off fresh primary fruit and the textural clarity biodynamic farming can bring to a glass. It wears the estate's whole philosophy more visibly than Prologo does, at a friendlier price.

Rosato is a rosé made from that same estate Montepulciano, direct and unfussy, the kind of wine built for a warm afternoon rather than a cellar.

Pecorino is Stefano's favourite of everything the estate makes, and the variety he keeps planting more of. Grown at De Fermo's altitude, it comes out aromatic, mineral, and saline, with real ageing potential, a serious white in a region still better known for its reds. Wine Spectator has featured De Fermo prominently in coverage of Abruzzo's new generation of producers, rare for a biodynamic, natural-leaning estate, and in the US the wines are imported by Rosenthal, respected for its small, carefully chosen roster of Italy's best artisan estates.

Why Visit

De Fermo doesn't run a formal, walk-in tasting room. But for anyone who arranges a visit directly with the estate, it's one of the more striking things to see in Abruzzo wine country: an 18th-century cellar, buried and rediscovered, restored rather than replaced, now humming with a rigorous modern biodynamic operation, plus the working farm around it, olive groves, grazing cattle, and vegetable plots alongside the vines. Standing in the vineyard, you can also see the cordon royat pruning and how different it looks from the tall pergola canopies on nearly every other hillside nearby.

Loreto Aprutino itself is worth the trip. It's a genuinely handsome fortified medieval hill town, home to the Castello Chiola and the Romanesque Church of Santa Maria in Piano with its old frescoes, and it sits at the centre of a long-established Abruzzese olive oil tradition, enough to fill a morning or afternoon before or after a visit to the estate.