Montepulciano d'Abruzzo: The Italian Red That Takes Me Back to Being Eight Years Old in the Back of a Car

There is a specific memory that comes back to me every time I look at the Montepulciano Castelvecchio d'Abruzzo on the shelf.

I am in the back seat of a car somewhere in central Italy. I am eight, maybe nine. My brother is next to me. Between us is a laptop, and we are watching Gladiator, because that was the film we watched on every long car journey in that period of my childhood and neither of us ever got tired of it. Outside the window, the Italian countryside is doing what the Italian countryside does: being impossibly beautiful in a way that children on long car journeys are almost biologically incapable of appreciating.

Then the car slows down. My parents have spotted a winery.

This happened on every Italian holiday we took. At least twice a year, we would load into the car and drive south from Zurich. My parents loved Italy with the particular intensity of two people who had found, in another country, exactly the relationship with food and wine and slowing down that their Swiss upbringing had not quite provided. Every trip involved a version of the same moment: a turn off a main road, a lane lined with tall cypress trees, a castle or an old farmhouse at the end of it, and my brother and I in the back seat exchanging the particular look of children who know that whatever was supposed to happen next is now on hold indefinitely.

I did not understand wine at eight. I did not understand it at twelve either. What I understood was the setting. The quiet of those places. The smell of warm stone and vine leaves and whatever was being poured into the tall glasses my parents were holding. The conversations that stretched far longer than they were supposed to. The table that someone always found for us in the shade, with bread and something salty while my brother and I waited.

Growing up, those stops felt like interruptions. Looking back, they were the best part of every trip. And looking at a bottle of Italian red now, all of it comes back in an instant.

What Montepulciano actually is

Before anything else, it is worth clearing up a confusion that follows this wine everywhere it goes.

Montepulciano is both the name of a grape variety and the name of a hilltop town in Tuscany. They are not the same thing and they have almost nothing to do with each other. The town of Montepulciano in Tuscany produces a wine called Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, which is made primarily from Sangiovese grapes and contains no Montepulciano grapes whatsoever. The Montepulciano grape, meanwhile, is grown primarily in Abruzzo on the central Adriatic coast of Italy and in neighbouring regions including Marche, Molise and Puglia. The naming coincidence has confused wine drinkers for decades and is worth knowing before you order.

Montepulciano d'Abruzzo is the most important and most widely exported expression of the grape. It is one of Italy's most produced DOC wines and one of its most loved precisely because it delivers the kind of full-bodied, generous, food-friendly red that Italian wine is associated with at a price point that makes it accessible in a way that Barolo or Brunello is not.

The Abruzzo region sits between the Apennine mountains to the west and the Adriatic Sea to the east, and that geography is fundamental to understanding why Montepulciano thrives there. The mountains provide altitude and the temperature variation between warm days and cool nights that preserves the grape's natural acidity and freshness. The Adriatic provides dry sea breezes that move through the vineyards and reduce the risk of disease in the thick-skinned, late-ripening vines. The result is a region that produces ripe, generous fruit without losing the structure that makes Italian red wine worth taking seriously.

The Montepulciano grape itself is thick-skinned and deeply pigmented, which gives the wine its characteristic inky, near-purple colour. Under Italian DOC law, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo must contain at least 85 percent Montepulciano grapes, with up to 15 percent Sangiovese permitted to provide additional acidity and freshness. The wine must be aged for a minimum of five months before release, with Riserva versions spending at least two years in maturation, including nine months in oak. It is the kind of regulation that exists because the tradition behind it is worth protecting.

What is in the glass

The Montepulciano Castelvecchio is the specific bottle we pour at Nectar, and it is a generous, approachable expression of everything the grape is known for.

The colour is deep ruby with violet edges, the kind of colour that announces itself in the glass before you have done anything with it. On the nose, aromas of black cherry and dark plum come first, followed by hints of dried herbs, leather and a slight earthiness that is distinctly Italian in character. This is not a fruit-forward New World wine trying to impress you immediately. It is an Old World wine that opens up over the course of the evening, revealing more of itself gradually rather than all at once.

On the palate, the tannins are soft but present, providing the structure the wine needs without making it drying or astringent. The acidity is medium, enough to keep the wine lively and food-friendly but not sharp or aggressive. The finish carries notes of chocolate and liquorice, which is where the oak influence comes through and gives the wine its warmth and its length. Cherry, chocolate, liquorice: three words that describe it accurately and that happen to be the three words we put on the menu alongside it, because sometimes the simplest description is the truest one.

It is a wine that is immediately recognisable and immediately enjoyable. It does not ask anything of you before you drink it. It does not require you to understand the region or know the producer or have an opinion about the vintage. It asks only that you pour it and pay attention, and then it does the rest.

Why Montepulciano is our most poured red

The Castelvecchio is our only full-bodied red served by the glass at Nectar, which means it is the natural choice for anyone who wants something with weight and depth rather than something lighter and more delicate. That position on the list means it moves quickly, but it would move quickly regardless of its position because the grape itself is one of the most widely recognised Italian varieties in the world.

Montepulciano is one of those names that wine drinkers at every level of knowledge and experience have encountered before. It sits in the same category of familiarity as Pinot Grigio or Chianti: a wine people feel comfortable ordering because they have a reasonable sense of what they are going to get. That familiarity is an advantage at a bar, because it removes the hesitation that can accompany less familiar wines and replaces it with the quiet confidence of someone choosing something they already know they enjoy.

But the Castelvecchio also earns its position rather than simply occupying it. People who order it because the name is familiar come back to it because the wine is genuinely good. And that combination, a recognisable name on a bottle that actually delivers, is rarer than it should be.

Where it fits on the table

I describe this wine to guests as the classic red. The one I recommend to anyone who tells me they want something on the heavier side, something with body and character that sits alongside food rather than getting lost next to it.

The most obvious pairing is the meat platter. The Montepulciano's tannins and dark fruit character do exactly what a full-bodied red should do alongside rich, savoury meat: they cut through the fat and protein of the chicken skewer and the Greek sausage, amplify the seasoning, and leave the palate refreshed for the next bite. The earthiness in the wine picks up the earthiness in the meat in a way that feels natural rather than engineered.

The pairing that surprises people most is the grilled halloumi. The conventional instinct is to reach for a lighter red or a white alongside cheese, and for most cheeses that instinct is correct. But halloumi, with its density and its significant salt content, is not most cheeses. The saltiness calls for something that can push back, and the Montepulciano does exactly that. More interestingly, the forest fruit chutney we serve alongside the halloumi echoes the dark fruit character of the wine in a way that makes both the food and the glass taste more considered. It is the pairing I point people toward most often when they are undecided between the wine and something else.

The beef patties on our menu are the third pairing I would always recommend. This is the wine's natural home: richly flavoured, protein-heavy, fatty food that needs tannin and acidity to cut through it. Montepulciano and a good burger is one of the most reliable combinations in the entire pairing logic of what we serve at Nectar, and it consistently produces that particular expression of quiet satisfaction in people who try it for the first time.

A note on what Old World wine means and why it matters here

The Montepulciano Castelvecchio is an Old World wine in the fullest sense of the phrase. Old World refers to the traditional wine-producing regions of Europe, principally Italy, France, Spain, and Germany, where the culture of winemaking has been shaped over centuries by the relationship between a specific place, its soil, its climate, and the people who have farmed it across generations. Old World wines tend to prioritise balance, acidity, and a connection to the landscape they come from over the bold, fruit-forward power that New World wines from California, Australia, or South America often chase.

Understanding the Old World character of this wine helps explain why it works so well at a table with food. It was not made to be enjoyed on its own, in isolation, as a standalone experience. It was made to be part of a meal, to move alongside the food, to support the conversation and the company rather than demand attention for itself. That philosophy is exactly what we are looking for at Nectar, where the food and drink are designed to work together rather than separately, and where the best evenings are the ones where nobody is thinking too hard about what they ordered.

The memory that stays

I did not appreciate those Italian winery stops at eight years old. I wanted to finish watching Gladiator and get back on the road. The wine meant nothing to me and the setting, which was objectively breathtaking, meant very little more.

But something was going in, without my knowing it. The particular quality of Italian light in the late afternoon. The sound of gravel under car tyres on a long approach road lined with trees. The way those places smelled: warm, alive, slightly fermented, ancient. The unhurried pace of every adult in every room we walked into, as if being in a place that had been making wine for hundreds of years had taught everyone there something about not rushing.

I did not know, at eight, that I would one day open a bar in Edinburgh and put a bottle of Montepulciano on the wine list. I did not know that looking at that bottle years later would bring all of it back in an instant: the cypress trees, my brother next to me in the back seat, my parents disappearing into yet another winery, the particular contentment of children who have nowhere else to be.

The Montepulciano Castelvecchio d'Abruzzo is an excellent wine at a fair price that pairs beautifully with the food we cook at Nectar. It is also the bottle that, more than any other on the list, carries an entire version of my childhood in it. That is perhaps more than a wine needs to do. But some bottles manage it anyway.

Book a table at Nectar Bar and order a glass of the Montepulciano. Preferably with the halloumi or the meat platter. Definitely without the laptop.

Opening hours Tuesday to Thursday: 5pm to 11pm Friday: 5pm to 1am Saturday: 12pm to 1am Sunday: 12pm to 11pm Monday: Closed

Nectar Bar, 73 Broughton Street, Edinburgh EH1 3RJ