Abruzzo-based San Lorenzo Vini organized an interesting meeting at its headquarters to take stock of production, let us taste some old vintages of Pecorino Superiore and cheer us up with a wonderful talk by anthropologist Ernesto Di Renzo. Luciano Lombardi Vignadelmar went there for us.
Gianluca and Fabrizio Galasso, with their uncle Gianfranco Barbone, are the owners of San Lorenzo Wines, beautiful Abruzzo winery, which has the remarkable vineyard estate of 168 hectares, divided among the different hillsides surrounding the winery body, from which they make 700,000 bottles. The farm landscape is very beautiful, to say the least: the vineyards are interspersed with olive trees and almost surrounded by numerous beautiful cypress trees.
Last June, at their invitation, I went to Castilenti (Teramo), to follow this very interesting day, divided between tasting and conference. Within the property also stands the Giglio Rosso, lovely b&b with swimming pool, where I slept the night before and where we had lunch, before leaving to return to Rome.
The San Lorenzo Pecorino Vertical
The first stage of the day was held at Palazzo De Sterlich, in the halls on the ground floor of this beautiful and monumental 16th-century palace, where, along with the barrels and barriques used to age some of the winery’s wines and hundreds of bottles being aged, I attended a tasting of six vintages of their Pecorino San Lorenzo. It is always vinified in concrete tanks and never makes passages in wood.
The tasting promised to be interesting. Given the depth of the vintages in the tasting: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2018, we would get to make An initial assessment of the durability of this wine over time.. The results were positive, although the older vintages were in an advanced state of oxidation: indeed, they boasted taste profiles of truly unimaginable freshness and vivacity. On the younger wines, of course, there was no evidence of any problems with ageing but only the positive peculiarities of the grape variety.
It should be noted that this wine is produced in about 40,000 bottles annually and therefore the estate pays special attention to it. For my part, during the discussion that took place among us tasting participants, I emphasized the need for the winery to keep a certain quantity of bottles annually, which would be useful in the future for organizing similar events around the world and also for commercial purposes.
Cultural aspects
But, unquestionably, the speech of greatest depth and interest, also because of the different slant from the usual ones desired by the author, was that of Professor Ernesto Di Renzo, a brilliant Anthropologist from the Tor Vergata University of Rome, who debuted with a talk entitled: “You say Pecorino, you mean Genius Loci”, all focused on the cultural motivations behind every choice each of us makes when we decide to drink a given wine, perhaps from an indigenous grape variety, over another from international varieties.
We also popped into the new, functional production cellar where “Gulliver” a work by the famous artist Marcel Wanders, more than six meters high.
I want to add that, both the night before at dinner and after this tasting, we also tried “some” other old bottles and all of them favorably impressed us. But to take stock of the current production you will have to wait for the release of the next edition of our Essential Guide to the Wines of Italy 2026. Be patient!
