Lammidia, "Frekt, Vino Bianco" 2022

“Uva e basta!” It doesn’t take much translation to figure out what they mean by this, and if any confusion lingers, their wines will do the talking. Grapes – and that’s it! Davide Gentile and Marco Giuliani are the braintrust behind the very popular Abruzzese endeavor Lammidia. The story behind the name touches on a bit of the occult: La-‘Mmidia means something like “the evil eye” in the Abruzzese dialect, with the upshot being something like a curse, bad fortune, something rotten in the State of Denmark, all that good stuff. With their first vintage in 2010, the fermentations were not only slow, they weren’t starting at all! Enter Grandmother Antonia, one of the “wise women” of a popular tradition whereby an ancient ritual akin to a kind of holy-water-cleansing is said to expel the ‘mmidia (la-mmidia) from the house. So the legend goes, after Antonia performed the ritual, fermentations not only magically started, but they were off and flying! Ever since, at the start of each vintage’s fermentation, the ritual is performed and thereby the mmidia banned. This is the project – something a bit mysterious, a bit wild, a bit pure, and certainly fermentation-transparent. The wines often carry real clarity and purity, mixed with a savory aspect of the fermented kind. Yeasty, beery, but depending on which cuvée, the wine will also have a real dense core of fruit that is sliced with starbright acid. Awesomely fun zero/zero wines from the foothills outside of Pescara on the Abruzzese coast, some 20km from the Adriatic Sea.

Abruzzo, Italy. 100% Pecorino, macerated on the skins overnight and fermented with wild yeasts in concrete tanks. Zero/zero.