A decade-old wine of impeccable quality—and deep family tradition besides—in the $20 range? It’s not impossible to find, as we’ve shown before, but such wines are almost always from Bordeaux. Not today. Today we have one of the seminal red wines of southern Italy—a wine which effectively put the region of Puglia on the international wine map—and its value proposition cannot be overstated.
Crafted from Negroamaro grapes grown in the iron-rich red clays of Puglia’s Salento peninsula, “Notarpanaro” (so named for the
contrada, or farm, it hails from) is a rite-of-passage wine—a true benchmark. It’s an Italian wine list staple and the perfect wine to showcase the terroir of Puglia, a.k.a. the “heel” of the Italian boot: Now with nearly a decade of bottle age, this luscious red is right in its sweet spot, mature but not tired in the least and impressive in every way. This isn’t a nostalgia play—it’s a winery with seven generations of history operating at the top of its game and delivering unparalleled value. Rich fruit (from 40+-year-old vines), dusty earth, and the aromatic complexity that comes with time…it’s all there. At this price especially, no Italian wine lover—no wine lover, period—can afford to pass it by!
I first tasted this wine more than 20 years ago at the Taurino winery in Guagnano, which is about 20 kilometers northwest of Lecce on Puglia’s Salento peninsula. Nearby is the town of Salice Salentino, which lends its name to one of the best-known wine appellations (DOCs) in the region: It’s an area chock-full of large-scale vineyards planted to massive, bush-trained vines, and like Puglia in general, it was known historically as one of Italy’s most prolific sources of bulk wines—wines made in large regional cooperatives and shipped anonymously in tanker trucks to points further north in Italy (and beyond). In coastal towns like Brindisi, the whitewashed buildings and blazing sunlight give Puglia the look of a Greek island, and like the rest of southern Italy, Puglia’s ancient winemaking culture was heavily informed by that of the Greeks who colonized much of the area.
Bush-trained vines were a traditional necessity throughout the Salento peninsula, which is buffeted by a crossfire of strong breezes from both the Ionian and Adriatic seas. The alberello (“little bush”) method was employed to protect grape bunches not just from wind but from intense heat and sunlight as well—this is one of the most fertile, flat stretches of land in all of Italy, known not just for wine grapes at scale but grains for bread and olives for oil. Soils are iron-rich clays with some limestone, which take on a distinctive rust-colored hue during the growing season.
Grape-growers going back seven generations, the Taurinos were among the early “estate-bottlers” in this traditionally poor, co-op-dominated region. The late Cosimo Taurino, still immortalized on the wine’s label, debuted “Notarpanaro” in 1970, choosing to bottle the wine as a “varietal” Negroamaro rather than blend it with Malvasia Nera, as was traditional in the Salice Salentino DOC. At the time of my visit to Taurino (2000), Puglia was having a “moment” of international recognition thanks to the discovery of a genetic link between Primitivo—another native grape of Salento—and American Zinfandel. But I found (and still find) Negroamaro much more interesting, more structured, and more serious than Primitivo. Meaning “black and bitter” in Italian, Negroamaro is indeed “black” in terms of its fruit character: lots of rich, dark fruit is framed by firm tannins and complemented by a deep baking spice component and lots of dark, dusty earth.
Today’s 2010 is 100% Negroamaro aged six months in used French oak
barriques, followed by extended periods in glass-lined concrete tanks and bottle before release. It is perfectly mature now, with a pitch-perfect mix of lush fruit and spicy, savory secondary aromas, and perhaps most important of all, it completely defies stereotypes about wines from this region—it is not in any way jammy or “cooked,” and in fact continues to show some youthful freshness. In the glass, it’s a deep, nearly opaque ruby-black moving to garnet and burnt orange at the rim, with concentrated aromas of mulberry, black raspberry, Morello cherries, cacao nibs, licorice, coffee grounds, hazelnuts, exotic spices, and turned earth. It is medium-plus in body, leaning towards full, with tannins now the texture of silk and a pleasingly viscous, chocolatey feel on the palate. Although it is not throwing much sediment, decant it just before serving at 60-65 degrees in Bordeaux stems; it hints at everything from Left Bank Bordeaux to Carignane from Priorat to old school Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel and should be paired with a hearty dish that’ll play to its richness. Beef
braciole is very traditional to Puglia and should do the trick nicely here. This wine is not to be missed!
