Brunori Rosso Piceno 2018

Pizza demands juicy, fresh wine and time and time again, I find myself reaching for anything Cristina Brunori makes. A world-class producer of Tuesday nighters, her old vines, mineral soil, and the temperate winds of the Adriatic all help produce vibrantly flavored grapes. She says her job is to not mess up what Mother Nature is so good at making.

Brunori wines always represent great bang for the buck. Very rarely can find such pristine fruit and food friendliness in a $16 bottle of wine.

Cristina and her family grow Sangiovese and Montepulciano in the Marches, a spectacularly beautiful spot in Italy right on the Adriatic coast. It’s an area often missed by American tourists, too far from Tuscany, Venice or Rome to ever make it there in the same trip. But, the landscape is beautiful, the fish and produce out of this world. The pizza is not too bad either.

When the Brunori make pizza in their 150 year old wood fired oven, they drink their Rosso Piceno, a bowl of berries with just the right touch of Italian rusticity. You should too. The 2018 just hit my cellar, it’s a terrific Tuesday nighter, get it into your pizza rotation ASAP!