Why it matters
The producer
The Marramiero family has been growing vines on the same Pescara hillside for more than a century. For most of that time the grapes left the estate in bulk. Dante Marramiero changed that. He built a commercial winery at Masseria Sant'Andrea, the hilltop farm that sits at 270 metres above the Abruzzo plain, and directed it toward estate-bottled wine. His son Enrico carried the project forward, adding a modern cellar and raising the ambition of what a family winery in Rosciano could produce.
The signature bottle is Montepulciano d'Abruzzo DOC: a red wine from the native Montepulciano grape, oak-aged, tannic, and built around the characteristic acidity the variety carries from this part of central Italy. Trebbiano d'Abruzzo, the native white grape of the region, anchors the white side of the range. Both varieties have grown on this land across the full span of the family's vine-growing history.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Rosciano sits in the province of Pescara, roughly between the Gran Sasso massif to the north and west and the Adriatic coast to the east. At 270 metres, the Masseria Sant'Andrea hillside catches enough altitude to slow ripening compared to the low coastal strip. That delay matters for Montepulciano: the grape has high natural acidity, and cooler nights on elevated ground preserve that acidity through to harvest rather than burning it off in late summer heat.
The Pescara hills belong to the broader Abruzzo DOC geography. Montepulciano d'Abruzzo DOC covers the Montepulciano grape grown across the region; the label names both grape and origin, though the Montepulciano grape has no connection to the Tuscan town of the same name. It is an Abruzzo native, and Rosciano has been one of its natural addresses for generations.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
Montepulciano and Trebbiano d'Abruzzo are the two native Abruzzo grapes at the centre of the estate's range.
In the cellar, Marramiero uses an XTRI optical berry sorter, a machine that passes individual grapes under fluorescence and infrared light to identify and discard any impurity before fermentation begins. The sorting happens grape by grape, not cluster by cluster. The practical consequence is that what enters the fermentation vessel is cleaner fruit: fewer broken skins, no leaves or under-ripe berries that would otherwise add bitter or herbaceous notes to the wine. For a tannic grape like Montepulciano, where the difference between coarse and well-integrated tannin often comes down to the quality of the raw material, that level of selection at intake matters.
Wines to know
The range in view
The core of the range is built on two DOC designations: Montepulciano d'Abruzzo DOC for the red wines and Trebbiano d'Abruzzo DOC for the whites. Both appellations link grape to region directly on the label, so the bottle name itself identifies what is in the glass and where it comes from.
Montepulciano d'Abruzzo is the main red wine: spiced cherry and plum on the nose, a palate where firm tannin and the grape's natural acidity hold together rather than pulling against each other, and oak-derived depth from barrel ageing. The wine has enough grip to stand beside food but enough fruit and acid to keep it from feeling locked.