Recently we visited Stefania Pepe and her husband, Adone Del Negro, in the Controguerra zone of northern Abruzzo. It was my first time visiting her property or her father's, the legendary Emidio Pepe, a pioneer of the "back to the future" winemaking movement in Italy. Yet it was hardly my first time dealing with wines from the Pepe family; my very first post on mondosapore (October 2005) was about a tasting where I first tasted an array of Emidio's always interesting and sometimes perplexing Trebbianos and Montepulcianos d'Abruzzo.
The differences between the father and the daughters are striking, and they ultimately go far in explaining the varying character of Emidio's wines and Stefania's. Where Emidio is a compact country gentleman with a reserved, courtly manner, the daughters are tall, vivacious an
d definitely not reserved. Stefania, especially, is an outsized personality -- dare I say a kind of Anna Magnani of wine? She's passionate, outspoken and kind, but, I suspect, pretty tough on people who don't live up to her standards. Her husband Adone is a calmer, slightly more detached sort of person, and here I suspect he provides the groundedness a passionate character like Stefania needs in both life and work.
Stefania at site of a vineyard to be born some time after
her second child
If you detect my warm personal connection with this couple, you're right. They're hard not to like. They are both grape farmers and winemakers, and their wines seem to express their personalities as clearly as they express their terroir. There aren't many wines which, when you put some into your mouth, cause you to exclaim, "This wine's alive! It's dynamic!" This is what you get with Stefania's in particular. Even if they aren't to your taste, you have to admit that they're highly individuated.
Note that like many of her father's wines, some bottles of Stefania's wines can be rather off-putting when first opened. (You wanted natural wine, didn't you?) After the gases blow off, the true beauty of these wines knocks you out.
Casks and Concrete
In general, Stefania adheres to her father's philosophy of minimal intervention in both vineyard and cellar. Some of her vineyards are certified biodynamic, while others are certified organic, with every effort made to have all classified as BD. She is candid about needing to apply sulfur and copper to the vines when conditions are particularly poor (excessive moisture), but only then. Green manuring with cut grass helps reduce pests and keeps the vines from being burnt or water-stressed in the summer heat.
One of the initial differences with her father was over the use of concrete tanks for fermentation and storage. He scoffed at it as "too old-fashioned" (ironic, that), but the results persuaded him to go back to the future; Emidio uses cement now. oak casks. Emidio now uses casks as well as cement tanks, convinced by the example his daughter had shown him.
We tasted one of Stefania's wines made in cement and one in wood, and the cement was far more alive on the palate and nose than the wood. Whatever it may have lacked in finesse, it more than made up for in verve and the delight of drinking it, so intense was the fruit. Of course, her wines aged in oak are not a bit overdone; the wood is used judiciously, and the results are perhaps a little more conventional, hence pleasing to most wine-drinkers. Both containers yield wines that are deeply interesting.
(The text in red is a revision of an error that Stefania flagged. I had originally written that Emidio didn't believe in using cement, which is of course a ridiculous misstatement. Mental dyslexia at work! -- * TDH)
Stefania said she wants to control the entire vinification process as much as possible. This entails a mix of the old (grapes are all crushed by their feet, though they wear rubber boots, you may be relieved to know) and the new (a soft-press machine using technology the peasants of yore would
never have conceived of).
The pictures will give you a thousand words' worth of my tiresome prosing.
Stefania, in motion as ever, in front of the crushing table

Contrary to rumor, there is no feud or bad blood between Emidio and Stefania. It is not an Italian Falconcrest
.
.
E finalmente - i vini!
Here are some salient notes on the wines Stefania had us try.
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