Antichi Poderi Jerzu Marghia Cannonau di Sardegna 2021
£16.75
The wine
Ruby red with purple hints. Full of blackberries, redcurrants and dried herbs.
Cannonau is Grenache under its Sardinian name, and on the island it gives a wine with more herbal and savoury character than it does in the southern Rhône. Sardinia grape names carry its history: Vermentino arrived from the Ligurian coast, and Cannonau is Grenache, brought by the Spanish during four centuries of Aragonese rule. The island claims Cannonau is older still and native, a question DNA has yet to settle. Antichi Poderi Jerzu work hillside sites running from the Gennargentu mountains in the heart of Sardinia.
The producer
Antichi Poderi Jerzu
View all Antichi Poderi Jerzu winesIn the remote hills of Ogliastra, on Sardinia’s wild eastern coast, the village of Jerzu has grown Cannonau for centuries. Its name is woven into the grape’s story: this single sub-zone produces a remarkable share of all the island’s Cannonau.
Antichi Poderi Jerzu was founded here in 1950, when the village doctor persuaded forty-five growers to pool their best plots and aim higher. Today the cooperative unites more than four hundred families, tending vines on schist and limestone slopes that tumble from the Gennargentu mountains towards the sea.
Under head winemaker Biagio Boi, with the renowned Franco Bernabei consulting, the wines run from bright, easy-drinking Vermentino and Cannonau to the flagship Marghia, drawn from old vines and aged in Slavonian oak.
This is Sardinia at its most authentic: a land of long-lived people and longer traditions, bottled with quiet confidence.
