Montefalco Sagrantino

Four kinds of ground share it: Plio-Pleistocene yellow sands with beds of lake conglomerate, especially around Montefalco itself; lake clays and sandy clays south-west of Bevagna; young sandy and stony alluvium on the flats; and older clay subsoils. Winters bring snow a few times a year and some 40 days of frost.

The wine is Sagrantino alone, made dry or as a passito from grapes dried until they reach 17 per cent potential alcohol. Both age at least 33 months from the first of December of the harvest year — the dry wine at least twelve of them in oak — and then four months in bottle. Sagrantino long had no market: its low-yielding vines were kept for a passito saved for the great religious feasts and drunk at home. Montefalco became a DOC in 1979, and Montefalco Sagrantino a DOCG in 1992.