Third bad Pepe in the past month, and I’ve gone 0 for my last 4. (I want to give props to official importer, Oliver McCrum and his business partner, Michele, who kindly replaced a bottle of oxidized Pecorino without me even inquiring).
I may give Pepe one more chance at retail, with a hyperfocus on buying through official importation channels, and if that results in a dud then I’m done. And this is so sad because I’ve had a couple that were thrilling. But I’m not willing to play a gambling game with such terrible odds against me anymore.
2020 Emidio Pepe Trebbiano d’Abruzzo - Italy, Abruzzi, Trebbiano d’Abruzzo (1/10/2024)
– decanted 1.5 hrs. before initial taste –
– tasted non-blind on Days 1 and 2 –
NOSE: {not much there}
BODY: orange color
TASTE: flat; {not much there}; light fuzzy mineral; citric whisper. Worthless. Day 2: same as Day 1 — there’s just nothing there — perhaps some faint school paste. Yay. Drain pour. NR (flawed)
Sorry to read, especially since you really like the wines.
While not the same of course I thought of Tiberio and then saw your other post. Really like the pecorino among the entry wines, for a step up in Trebbiano I thought the fonte canale was great (can’t recall the vintage).
I had excellent bottles of the 2017 (sourced in Italy) and have had many excellent bottles of 2006 (drank at Babbo in NY), fwiw. Also just had a 2021 in Italy that was very enjoyable. A wild, unpolished wine, but sounds like some kind of transportation issue or a cork issue, unless the ‘20 is not a good year.
I just had this wine once. A 2019 “imported” by a friend from Italy directly. It showed beautifully! So sad to hear that bottle variation is such an issue.
I’ve made this joke before … Pepe bottles are like Van Morrison concerts … you get some total stinkers then the magic/transcendence next time just when you swear you’re going to walk away.
Maddening but you keep throwing € at them and coming back …
I had the '20 at the estate last year and thought it excellent.
All the Pepe we import is temperature controlled (trucking in Italy is controlled for 9 months of the year, container is controlled all year), but that may not be true of all importers, she has several. Plus grey market, of course.
Wouldn’t one that young be a different bottling than the one typically exported to the US (old vines vs younger vines)? IIRC, folks were grey marketing the Montepulciano and Trebbiano younger vines that were different from the export bottlings for years and that was the cause of different showings. I’m also generally more worried about storage conditions with grey market wines.
Yes, there are now different young vines and old vines bottlings of both Trebbiano and Montepulciano. The old vine examples have ‘Vigne Vecchie’ stamps on the labels in both cases. Pecorino is a single bottling.
The two wines are completely different, and the prices are too. Make sure you know what you’re getting. Until several years ago the labels were the same, which was sort of a nightmare.
As I said above, we always use working reefer containers for wine, and we pay extra for temperature controlled trucking in Italy for wine for about 9 months of the year. Our warehouse tells us that they unload a lot of wine from non-refrigerated containers…
