I Asked Chiara Pepe Five Questions About Wine, Family, and Who She'd Drink Wine With
The heir to one of Italy's most radical wine estates on Abruzzo, agroforestry, Rudolf Steiner, and why courage is the only advice worth giving
There’s an intense kind of pressure that comes with inheriting something people have already decided is the pinnacle of winemaking.
Chiara de Iulis Pepe is the fifth generation of the Emidio Pepe estate in Torano Nuovo, Abruzzo. Her grandfather built one of the most cult-followed wineries in Italy on a philosophy that’s extremely simple - grow the grapes, make the wine, don’t interfere. No filtration, no fining, no additives, no manipulation of any kind. The wines are bottled unfiltered, aged long, and sent into the world to do what they do. Depending on the vintage and the bottle and the person drinking it, that can be either extraordinary or difficult.
She is now the one responsible for what happens next.
Thanks to my friends at Galiena, I got a rapid-fire interview with Chiara.
The biggest misconception people have about Abruzzo is that it’s cheap pizza wine
This lands with particular weight when Chiara says it, because it is both completely accurate and slightly devastating. Abruzzo built its commercial reputation on Montepulciano d’Abruzzo at four euros a bottle. Abundant, easy, and genuinely good for what it is. The region paid for that success for decades. When you are the cheap pizza wine, you are not the serious wine. The category defines you whether you want it to or not.
What the misconception misses is the altitude, the diversity of soils, and the producers who have been doing something entirely different for a long time. The Apennines run along the western edge of the region and create a thermal range with more in common with mountain viticulture than with the warm, generous south the category implies. Pecorino, Trebbiano d’Abruzzo, Montepulciano in their best expressions, the Gran Sasso foothill vineyards. These are not pizza wine in any meaningful sense. They are wines that require patience, that reward cellaring, that have the kind of structural tension most casual Abruzzo drinkers have never encountered.
The wildest viticultural decision she made was to jump deep into agroforestry
This surprised me most, and I think it is the most important signal about where the estate is heading.
Agroforestry is the deliberate integration of trees, shrubs, and other plant life into vineyard systems rather than maintaining the monoculture that most commercial wine estates use. It is still genuinely radical in fine wine viticulture. The conventional wisdom is that vines are competitive plants that perform best when resources are concentrated. Single species rows, managed canopy, nothing else making demands on the soil. Agroforestry says the opposite. It says biodiversity above and below the soil surface creates a resilience and complexity that monoculture cannot replicate.
The Emidio Pepe estate was already biodynamic in practice before biodynamic was a marketing category. Chiara’s decision to go deeper into agroforestry is consistent with the estate’s philosophy. The farm as a living system rather than a production unit. But it is still a choice that most wine estates, even the radical ones, have not made. It is also a long-term bet. Agroforestry does not pay off in three years. It pays off in decades, which says something about how she is thinking about what she is building.
If she could go back to her first vintage, she would have picked some of the whites earlier
This is the answer of someone who has actually made wine rather than someone who has studied it. The temptation to wait, to let the fruit hang longer, to chase ripeness, to give the wine every possible advantage, is one of the defining decisions of every vintage. It is almost always more complicated than it looks from the outside.
At Emidio Pepe, where the Trebbiano is fermented with skin contact and handled without corrective intervention, picking timing has an outsized effect on what the wine becomes. Too late and you lose the acid tension that makes the wine interesting ten years in. The margin is narrow and in 2020, Chiara would have moved earlier.
What I appreciate about this answer is what it implies. She has a clear vision of what the wine is supposed to be, and her first vintage taught her something specific about how to get there. That is the opposite of following doctrine blindly. That is someone who is actually thinking.
Her advice for young winemakers - be courageous and be ambitious
Short, direct, and deliberately so. She could have said be patient, learn the land, spend time in other cellars. All the advice that gets given in wine. She said be courageous and be ambitious.
I find this interesting from someone who inherited an estate with an almost theological commitment to not changing anything. Courage at Emidio Pepe is not the courage to innovate in the obvious sense. It is the courage to hold a position that the market, the critics, and the consumers regularly challenge. It is the courage to plant trees in a vineyard when your neighbours think you have lost the plot.
Ambition, at an estate that already has everything, the reputation, the critical recognition, the allocated waiting lists, means something different than it means at a startup. It means not treating the inheritance as a ceiling.
If she could drink wine with anybody, it would be Rudolf Steiner
Of all the answers, this one tells you the most. And it is not really about wine.
Rudolf Steiner died in 1925. He was an Austrian philosopher and esotericist whose 1924 lectures on agriculture became the foundation of biodynamic farming. The idea that a farm is a self-sustaining organism, that the soil is alive in ways conventional agriculture does not account for, that the cosmos has a relationship to plant growth that is not mystical but practical. He never made wine. He had no interest in wine specifically. But his thinking underpins the entire philosophy of the estate she has inherited and the agroforestry direction she is taking it.
The Substack paid tier has an Abruzzo buying guide. Which wines to find, which producers are working at a level the category does not prepare you for, and what to say when you hand someone a bottle of Emidio Pepe and they ask what they are drinking.
I think your first paragraph about the pressure of inheritance is the focused lens this interview has to viewed through. Judgment in the marketplace will undoubtedly be harsh by many.