San Marzano Il Pumo Negroamaro 2024
£10.25
The wine
Intense aromas of blackcurrant and wild fruit are complemented by subtle notes of spice and thyme in this full-bodied Negroamaro. Charmingly balanced and juicy on the palate, and full of the flavours of southern Italy.
Negroamaro means roughly black and bitter, and it is the workhorse red of Salento, planted here for well over a millennium. It gives deep colour and a savoury, faintly bitter finish that keeps the ripeness in check, which is precisely what a wine from a climate this warm needs. Unoaked, so the fruit and the herbal edge come through clean.
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.
