San Marzano Tramari Primitivo Rosé Art Label 2025
£11.25
The wine
The Art Label is the same wine as the standard Tramari in a limited-edition presentation. Primitivo bled off its skins after a few hours gives a pale pink wine with strawberry and citrus, dry and crisp rather than sweet.
Primitivo is genetically identical to Zinfandel and to the Croatian variety Tribidrag, a connection established by DNA analysis only in the early 2000s. Made as a rosé it shows a side of the grape most people never meet: delicate, floral and built for drinking cold.
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.
