Umberto Cesari Amphora Trebbiano 2024
£14.45
The wine
A light, dry Trebbiano with delicate aromas of green apple and stone fruit, leading to a savoury palate with a delightful mineral undertone and a finish full of finesse. Vinified in amphora, which lends the texture.
Amphora fermentation returns to the oldest method there is: clay vessels rather than oak or steel. Clay is porous, so the wine breathes slowly as it would in a barrel, but contributes no flavour of its own. Applied to Trebbiano with a period on the skins, it gives a texture and grip the variety rarely shows.
The producer
Umberto Cesari
View all Umberto Cesari winesUmberto Cesari and his wife Giuliana started the company in 1965 with twenty hectares in the hills of Emilia-Romagna, with a single ambition: to make Sangiovese that could stand comparison with anything from over the border in Tuscany.
That was an unfashionable aim. Romagna has always grown Sangiovese in quantity, but the region's reputation was for volume rather than quality, and the grape was assumed to reach its best only further south. The estate now covers 355 hectares divided into named vineyards, La Casetta, Parolino, Ca Grande, Laurento, Liano, Claterna, Miravalle and Tauleto, each vinified separately.
The family have also revived Uva Longanesi, a red variety found growing wild on a farmhouse wall in Romagna in the 1950s and now grown by a small number of local producers, and they use terracotta amphorae for part of the range. Emilia-Romagna is better known for Lambrusco and for its food than for serious still wine, which makes what Cesari have built quietly remarkable.
