Pecorino

The name will make you smile. Pecora means sheep in Italian, and the story goes that shepherds driving their flocks through the Apennine mountains of Abruzzo would watch the animals seek out the wild Pecorino vines — drawn, apparently, to the sweetness of the ripening grapes. Whether the sheep had particularly good taste or simply good instincts, the grape took their name and kept it.

What the shepherds could not have known was that their casual viticulture was preserving one of central Italy's most distinctive white varieties. By the 1980s, Pecorino had nearly disappeared — crowded out by higher-yielding international varieties and forgotten by a wine industry chasing volume over character. It survived in isolated mountain vineyards, tended by farmers who had simply never stopped growing it.

The rediscovery came in the 1990s, when a handful of Abruzzo producers recognised what they had. Pecorino was not just surviving — it was producing wines of genuine complexity: full-bodied for a white, with high natural acidity, a distinctive floral lift, and a finish of bitter almond that no other variety in the region could replicate.

For Manila drinkers who find Pinot Grigio too thin and Chardonnay too heavy, Pecorino sits in exactly the right place — structured enough to hold its own with food, aromatic enough to drink on its own, and carrying a story that is genuinely worth telling at the table.