Trullo Flaminio
Two hectares of fifty-year-old alberello Negroamaro on the line of the Via Appia outside Brindisi, rescued by four friends from the wine trade — honest, old-school Salento, fiercely unmanipulated.
Trullo Flaminio exists because four friends from the wine trade could not let two hectares of fifty-year-old bush-trained Negroamaro disappear when the grower who had tended them for decades sold up in 2016. The vines stand on red clay over the Salento limestone a few kilometres from the Adriatic, on the line of the ancient Via Appia outside Brindisi.
The wines are made without tricks: native yeasts, fermentation in concrete, used tonneaux, no new wood anywhere. The Negroamaro is picked late with two extra weeks on the vine and closes on the bitter-almond note that is the variety's fingerprint; the Susumaniello, from vines planted in 2016, is the near-vanished local grape named for the little donkey of Puglian dialect — blueberry, violet and black pepper, a drinking wine rather than a curiosity.