Vaddinelli

The People

Vaddinelli is Felice Prosperi, and only Felice Prosperi: he farms the vines, makes the wine, and sells it himself, with no consultant and no staff mentioned anywhere. He didn't choose this life so much as have it land on him: in 1991 his father died and the family's sharecropping arrangement ended in the same stroke, leaving Prosperi, by his own account, suddenly managing a small farm, about half a hectare of old overhead-trained vines, that he had no idea how to run. He started with hired workers because he simply didn't know what else to do. Somewhere in those early years he fell for the vine and the wine it made, and "strange ideas," as he later put it, began to take shape in his mind.

Those ideas turned into decisions. In 1999 he tore out the old vineyard entirely and replanted it his own way. In 2002 he bought another half-hectare alongside it and replanted that too, and by then, in his own words, the idea had properly formed of "creating a small wine cellar and making a niche wine different from all the others." Two years after that he acted on it: the two ground-floor rooms, the loan, the family's objections, the stubbornness. The brand name, Vaddinelli, is a local place name rather than his surname, which is why you'll sometimes see him credited online as "Felice Vaddinelli," an understandable mix-up. But the man behind the label, and behind the legal entity Azienda Agricola Vaddinelli di Prosperi Felice, is Prosperi.

The Land

The vineyard sits at San Giacomo di Atri, a hamlet about four kilometres from Atri itself, in the province of Teramo, inside the Colline Teramane DOCG zone, the top classification tier for Montepulciano d'Abruzzo grown in these hills. It's a small holding, built up in the two half-hectare stages described above to just over a hectare of south-facing vines today, trained low along wires rather than on the old overhead pergola system Prosperi eradicated in 1999.

What makes the site worth a second look, though, is what surrounds it. Stand among Prosperi's rows and you look straight out over the Calanchi di Atri, the badlands, a landscape of steep, eroded clay gullies carved over centuries into rippling folds and ridges, protected today as a WWF nature reserve. It's one of the most striking pieces of scenery in inland Abruzzo, the kind of view that makes it obvious why someone would want to farm this particular hillside rather than a more convenient one.

How They Work

Prosperi describes his own method as "omeo-dinamica," homeodynamic farming, his own coinage for an approach that goes beyond organic minimums: no synthetic chemicals in the vineyard or the cellar, guided by principles closer to homeopathy than conventional agronomy. The wine is organic-certified, but that's the confirmation, not the headline. The practice is what he actually does, and has done since he began replanting in the late 1990s.

It also means he doesn't chase consistency, and he's unusually candid about what that costs him. "Regarding my culture of the vineyard," he told the Italian wine writer Roberto Gatti in 2019, "my ideas are to continue the search for no chemistry, trying to make a product completely different from the others, paying dearly for my fixation and conviction, because each year is different and the harvest is sometimes very poor or even not done! But Zoé is born of this sacrifice." In practice that means some vintages simply don't happen: he only bottles his top wine in years that meet his own bar, and by his own account that isn't every year.

The wine that does get made spends a long time getting there. By one detailed account, it rests first in stainless steel for at least twelve months, then moves into large old oak casks, around 22 hectolitres each, roughly 2,200 litres, big enough that the wine ages slowly and gently rather than picking up heavy oak flavour, for a further three years minimum before release. It's a patient regime even by the standards of Colline Teramane Riserva, where the DOCG rules already demand significantly longer ageing than for basic Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, and Prosperi appears to stretch it further still.

The Wines

Zoé, Greek for "life," a name Prosperi chose himself, is effectively the only wine Vaddinelli makes: a 100% Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Colline Teramane DOCG Riserva, the "Riserva" meaning it's aged well beyond the standard minimum before release. It's made only in vintages he judges exceptional, which is a genuinely small list: the earliest confirmed release is 2006, and the vintages that have followed it onto the market since are 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013, with no bottling at all in some years in between. That gap is the point: this is a wine that exists only when Prosperi decides the year earned it.

The vintages that have been tasted independently have been rated seriously. The Italian critic Roberto Gatti reviewed the wine for Winetaste.it in January 2019 under the headline "La grandezza del Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Docg Riserva Zoé," roughly, "the greatness of" the wine, and called it one of the best red wines in Italy. He scored the 2007 at 93/100, "Top Wine, Eccellente": an intense, complex nose of leather and tobacco, "monumental" on the palate, warm and full but carried by good acidity, with silky tannins and real suppleness through a long, salivating finish. The 2008 scored 90, dark garnet with an orange rim, its nose turning toward graphite, gunpowder and spice alongside the tobacco and leather, dense and concentrated but still fresh, opulent and powerful with a long close. The 2007 also picked up a Gold Medal at Rome's 15th Selezione del Sindaco competition, run by the national Città del Vino body, a result significant enough that the Abruzzo regional newspaper Il Centro covered it at the time.

Why Visit

There's no tasting room and no walk-in policy here. Vaddinelli is Prosperi's own home, and visits happen strictly by appointment. Even so, he's a listed member of Movimento Turismo del Vino, Italy's national wine tourism association, a small but real signal that welcoming visitors matters to him even as a one-man operation with no formal visitor infrastructure to speak of.

Arrange a visit, though, and the reward is unusual for an estate this size: Prosperi will open bottles from his own personal vertical of past vintages, effectively a private masterclass in how Zoé ages, delivered by the man who made it, in the cellar he built with his own hands against his family's advice, with the Calanchi badlands as the view on the way in.