Pecorino

A crisp, characterful white grape from the Marche and Abruzzo, rescued from near-extinction in the 1980s: fresh acidity, herby and citrus notes and real body.

White
Home: Central Italy, most likely the southern Marche
Italy

At a glance

Also known as

Pecorino di Arquata
Mosciolo
Vissanello

Colour

White

Origin

Central Italy, most likely the southern Marche

Main regions

Marche (Offida and the hills around Ascoli Piceno) and Abruzzo; smaller plantings in Umbria, Lazio, Tuscany and Liguria

Varietal or blend

Both. Bottled on its own as Offida Pecorino DOCG and Abruzzo Pecorino DOC (each at least 85% Pecorino); also a minor part of blended whites such as Falerio.

Body & sweetness

Medium to full-bodied for a white, dry; often 13–14% alcohol.

Taste & style

Flavour: Lemon and green apple, ripe yellow peach, and herbs such as sage and thyme; often a mineral, faintly salty finish.
Style: Fresh, mouth-watering acidity with more weight than most Italian whites. Usually unoaked and drunk young, though the best bottles keep for several years and turn honeyed.
Serving: Chill to 8–10°C; give fuller or older bottles 10–12°C.

In the vineyard & winery

Growing: Ripens early and crops lightly, which is why growers once swapped it for more productive grapes. Resists downy and powdery mildew well and does best on cool hillsides.
Winemaking: Usually fermented cool in stainless steel to keep it fresh; some producers add lees ageing or a touch of oak.

Food matches

Roast chicken with herbs and lemon
Grilled or baked fish
Seafood, such as spaghetti with clams
Pecorino cheese: the wine and the cheese share a name and a home, and the wine's acidity cuts through the cheese's salty richness

Notes

Low yields almost finished it: by the late 1970s only scattered old vines were left, mostly in the hills of the southern Marche.
In 1982 Guido Cocci Grifoni, whose family estate is at Ripatransone near Offida, was shown old Pecorino vines in a neglected vineyard at Arquata del Tronto. He grafted cuttings in 1983, planted a ‘mother vineyard’ in 1987 and released a Pecorino on its own in 1990. He is widely credited with saving the grape.
Abruzzo producers, Luigi Cataldi Madonna among the first, began putting the name on their labels in the 1990s. Plantings have since grown from about 87 hectares in the whole of Italy in 2000 to well over 1,000 hectares in Abruzzo alone.
Offida became a DOC in 2001 and was promoted to DOCG, Italy's top tier, in 2011.
The name comes with a story rather than a record: pecora is Italian for sheep, and flocks moving down from the mountains in September (the transhumance) are said to have stopped to eat the early-ripening, sweet grapes. Some tellings add that the shepherds paid the growers back in pecorino cheese.
Not to be confused with Pecorino cheese, or with Calabria's Greco Bianco, which is sometimes called Pecorello.