Emidio Pepe

The People

The Pepe family has made wine in Torano Nuovo since at least 1889, when Emidio's grandfather started at what the family still calls Casa Pepe. Emidio, born in 1932, took the bigger step in 1964: he built a proper cellar, put his own name on the label, and set out to prove Abruzzo's own grapes belonged next to Italy's best. He's famously a man of few words, said to do his talking through the vines, and his stock reply to any buyer who turned him down, "Manteniamoci giovani!" ("Let's stay young!"), later became the title of his own biography. His wife Rosa worked alongside him from the start and became something of a legend for her care in hand-checking and decanting old bottles.

Their daughters Sofia and Daniela took over running the estate in the late 1990s, Sofia in the vineyard and cellar, Daniela on the commercial side. In 2025 the Italian Republic recognised both with its Order of Merit, honouring sixty-plus years of family work. The fifth generation is already in place: Chiara de Iulis Pepe studied winemaking in Burgundy before taking over the cellar in 2020, while her sister Elisa runs hospitality, the agriturismo, restaurant, and the wider idea of the farm as one organism.

The Land

The estate farms seventeen hectares around Torano Nuovo, in the hills of Teramo province: on a clear day you can see the Adriatic from the vineyards, with the Gran Sasso, the highest range in the Apennines, rising inland behind them. Mild sea air meets cold mountain air, slowing ripening and keeping natural acidity intact rather than letting sugar run ahead of it, while near-constant wind keeps disease pressure low on an estate that has never sprayed a chemical fungicide.

Underfoot is a compact, blue-grey clay marl laced with limestone sand and pebbles, dense enough that vine roots dig down several metres for water and minerals, a large part of where the wines' minerality comes from. Almost everything planted is Trebbiano and Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, with a little Pecorino, trained on a pergola, a raised overhead canopy rather than a low wire trellis, which shades the fruit and moderates alcohol. The family calls their version the "Pepe Pergola": trees sheltering the vines, ground cover between the rows, the whole vineyard run as one ecosystem. Some vines are more than fifty years old, grown from cuttings Emidio grafted himself from older vines he admired, using massal selection, a slow, largely abandoned technique that preserves a variety's own diverse historic genetics instead of a handful of identical clones.

How They Work

Emidio never used chemicals, not out of ideology but because that was how his grandfather had farmed, and for decades he timed vineyard work to the moon by instinct, long before Italy had a name for it. When Sofia studied biodynamics formally in 2005, Rudolf Steiner's approach that treats a vineyard as one living system tied to lunar and seasonal cycles, she found her father had already been doing most of it by feel. Demeter certification, the main biodynamic standard, followed in 2006.

The cellar follows the same logic: nothing mechanical touches the wine. White grapes are foot-crushed by hand for forty to forty-five minutes, gentle enough to release juice and flavour without breaking the bitter stems. Montepulciano is hand-destemmed over nets, two people working each cluster until the berries fall through and only the softer skin tannins remain. Fermentation happens on its own, driven by wild yeasts already on the skins, in concrete tanks, some the original 1964 vessels, prized for steady temperature and neutral flavour. The wine is bottled the following spring with no filtering, fining, or oak; its natural CO2 acts as a preservative, and a bottle that gently referments is treated as a sign of life, not a fault.

That decanting ritual used to kick in at ten years old rather than twenty, pushed back as the family grew more confident in how the wines age. Rosa oversaw it for decades before the current generation took over.

The Wines

The Trebbiano d'Abruzzo is the estate's central wine, the one Emidio calls "a gift from above." Foot-crushed, concrete-fermented, and bottled unfiltered, it starts taut and mineral and simply keeps going: at twenty or thirty years old, great vintages turn structured and complex, overturning Trebbiano's usual reputation as a forgettable, everyday white. It's widely considered one of Italy's finest white wines.

The Montepulciano d'Abruzzo is what Emidio called his "conquest," a wine he had to win over decades of patience. Hand-destemmed and spontaneously fermented, it's dark, dense, and tannic in youth, needing twenty years or more to open into real aromatic complexity. His own test for readiness was simple: if the colour was still blood-dark, the wine still had what it needed.

There's also a Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo, the estate's rosé made from the same Montepulciano grapes in far smaller quantities. Emidio rarely talks about it, but in strong vintages its quality is unmistakable. A Pecorino was added more recently, to meet demand for a grape that's become fashionable across Abruzzo. Emidio has noted, half wry, that Pecorino now outprices the Trebbiano despite the Trebbiano being the better wine.

Since 2020, two of the oldest parcels, Casa Pepe and Branella, barely a stone's throw apart, have been vinified separately, guided by a geological mapping project with researcher Dr. Brenna Quigley. Despite sitting almost side by side, they taste distinctly different: Casa Pepe brighter and fine-grained, Branella broader and more saline, a small, striking sign of how much this soil changes from one row to the next.

Why Visit

The estate runs a full agriturismo out of the original family house, where Emidio was born and first made wine, now run by his granddaughter Elisa de Iulis Pepe. There are rooms to stay in, and a restaurant built around what the farm produces: a vegetable garden, olive oil, an old wheat variety called Senatore Cappelli, and chickpeas from the same fields.

Visits centre on guided walks through the cellar to the original 1964 concrete tanks, still in daily use, and tastings that can include library vintages. The depth of back vintages here is rare in Abruzzo, and it's one of the best ways to taste what these wines actually do: get better, not worse, with decades in bottle. Walks through the pergola-trained rows round it out. Given the estate's international reputation, booking well ahead is essential.