Vigneti del Salento I Muri Primitivo 2025
£10.95
The wine
This wine has a deep ruby red colour with violet reflections. On the nose, it has intense aromas of red berry fruit. Full-bodied with firm tannins, it is well-balanced with lots of ripe fruit flavours that carry through onto the finish.
The vineyards sit mostly around Manduria and Sava at 70 to 100 metres, farmed by growers who have worked with the group for many years and kept to lower yields than the region's norm. Vigneti del Salento is part of the Fantini group founded by Valentino Sciotti in 1994, and these Puglian wines are made at two wineries in the province of Taranto. The grapes were destemmed, gently pressed and cooled for a ten-day maceration with regular pumping over, then fermented under temperature control before malolactic in stainless steel.
The producer
Vigneti del Salento
View all Vigneti del Salento winesVigneti del Salento is part of the Fantini group, founded by Valentino Sciotti in 1994 to make serious wine from Abruzzo and, later, from southern Italy more widely. The Puglian wines are produced at two wineries in the province of Taranto, on the western flank of the Salento peninsula, by resident winemaker Danilo Gizzi with Filippo Baccalaro consulting. Filippo is a native of Piemonte who has now spent nearly two decades working in Puglia, drawn there by the ripeness of the fruit.
Salento is the heel of Italy, a long flat peninsula with sea on both sides, and its heat is tempered less by altitude than by that maritime exposure. The signature grape is Primitivo, genetically identical to Californian Zinfandel, which ripens early and to high sugar and gives the dark, sweet-fruited, generous reds the region is known for. Negroamaro, the other native, brings more structure and a bitter edge that stops the style becoming cloying.
The vineyards are concentrated around Manduria and Sava, worked by growers who have supplied the group for many years, and yields are held below the regional norm. The best parcels go into the old-vine bottlings, drawn from alberello bush vines up to a century old, which is a training method suited to heat and wind and almost impossible to mechanise.
