de Fermo - 'Don Carlino Bianco' - Pecorino - Colline Pescaresi, IT - 2021

Farming: Biodynamic (certified)
Age of vines: 20 years old (on average)
Exposure: Colline Pescaresi IGT
Fining/Filtration: Unfined/Unfiltered
Fun facts: Only 8000 bottles of this wine are produced annually.

Winemaking: After a three to five-hour maceration, the grapes are pressed and ferment off their native yeasts in wood (tonneaux and big oak barrels) and concrete tanks. The wine ages 9.5 months in the vessel they fermented in before being blended together. SO2 is added sparingly during spring rackings, never at bottling. In very challenging vintages, a homeopathic dose will be added at press.

Stefano is childhood friends with Federico Orsi. As pre-teens, they would buy bottles just to smell them and formed a tasting group in high school. Europe is different than the US.
The story of De Fermo, a relatively new estate founded in 2010 by Stefano Papetti Ceroni and his wife Eloisa de Fermo, is quite unconventional. Originally from Bologna, Stefano does not come from an agricultural background but nonetheless took an interest in wine at a very young age. He began a tasting group with his friends in high school (including his best friend Federico Orsi) and started visiting wineries as soon as he was old enough to do so. By Stefano's early 20s, wine had become his passion.
While studying law in Bologna, he met his future wife Eloisa. In their early years together, weekend trips to wineries became the norm. In 2007, seven years after the couple had met, Eloisa proposed they visit her family farm in Abruzzo; it had been in the de Fermo family for generations but she had no real connection to it. Not expecting much, Stefano was shocked to discover a sprawling, ancient property with a rich history:
"The first document stating viticulture in our farm is the Chronicon Casauriense (IX century), a chronicle of San Clemente abbey in Abruzzo. That document states the sale of our land by a Lombard-Frankish family to the abbey. The monks kept the farm alive for centuries. Our family bought the farm in 1785."
Stefano fell hard for the De Fermo farm. In the winter of 2007, he began spending every weekend in Abruzzo, learning from the contadini hired by Eloisa's family to run the property. He eventually asked his father-in-law if he could manage a hectare of vines to teach himself viticulture, providing a first glimpse of what owning a winery could be like. But with he and Eloisa holding down successful law careers in Bologna (not to mention two newborns), the idea seemed too crazy. And with no money to invest in the cellar he dreamed of building, it seemed like the weekend visits would have to do.
In 2009, Stefano asked the old man managing the property to see what was in the old farmhouse that had been abandoned since the 1940s. Unbeknownst to Eloisa, he discovered an underground cantina in the basement. After testing it for temperature and humidity, a small restoration was done on the old concrete tanks, two barrels were purchased, and 32 hectoliters of wine were produced in 2010, roughly 4000 bottles. Production increased each year, and by 2013 Stefano was managing all 16 hectares of vines, keeping the best grapes for the De Fermo estate and selling off the rest.
Today, almost all of the grapes go into the estate's independent production. For vines, 11 hectares of Montepulciano are planted along with 2.5 hectares of Pecorino, 2.5 hectares of Chardonnay, and 0.5 hectares of experimental white grapes including Trebbiano.
The terroirs here are considered amongst the best in the region. While the vast majority of vines in Abruzzo are trained in pergola, the contadini who managed the farm prior to Stefano (despite the entirety of the grape production being sold off) had meticulously maintained the vineyards' training systems of Cordon de Royat and alberello. The pergola "tradition" is a post-World War 2 phenomenon and also a sure-fire way to get very high yields. De Fermo is one of the only estates in all of Abruzzo to not own a single pergola vine. As a result, yields are often 50% lower than their average neighbor. The concentration in the wines is evident and a big part of what sets them apart.

Stefano and Eloisa have now fully reclaimed the property and are working the olive trees, wheat fields, vegetable gardens and raising animals in addition to tending the vines. This push for biodiversity very much stems from their dedicated, thoughtful approach to biodynamic farming, a philosophy that resonates in every aspect of their lives.: