San Marzano Anniversario 62 Primitivo di Manduria Riserva 2020
£24.25
The wine
Deep and complex flavours of prune, black cherry jam, spice and tobacco weave through the full-bodied palate, with a velvety texture and a long, complex finish of cocoa, coffee and vanilla bean. The most serious wine the cooperative makes.
Anniversario 62 marks the founding year of the cooperative, 1962, and is the most serious wine San Marzano make. The fruit comes from the oldest alberello parcels the members farm, and ageing is extended in French oak. Where Sessantanni is generous and open, this is built tighter and deeper, and rewards several years in bottle.
The producer
San Marzano
View all San Marzano winesIn 1962 nineteen growers in the village of San Marzano pooled their vineyards and founded a cooperative. More than sixty years later it draws on over 1,200 growers across Salento and the Manduria hills, and has become one of the most professional and forward-thinking houses in southern Italy.
The real asset is the old vines. Much of Puglia is still planted to alberello, the free-standing bush training the Greeks brought to the region, in which each vine stands alone without wires or posts. It cannot be machine harvested and it crops very little, but the fruit it gives is concentrated in a way trellised vines rarely match. Some of the plots behind Sessantanni and Anniversario 62 are well past sixty years old, and the names say exactly that.
The range is built on the three native reds of the heel of Italy: Primitivo, genetically identical to Zinfandel; Negroamaro, whose name means roughly black and bitter; and the near-forgotten Susumaniello. Passion and competence are the stated bywords, and the run of awards suggests they are more than a slogan.
