Pecorino: Italy's Most Underrated White Grape

By the early 1980s, the grape variety known as Pecorino had contracted to fewer than a dozen surviving plots, scattered across the high valleys of the Sibillini Mountains along the border of Marche and Umbria. Not forgotten, precisely; the name persisted in the oral memory of shepherds who had watched flocks eat the ripe clusters during the autumn transhumance, but very nearly gone. In 1982, Guido Cocci Grifoni, a producer in Ripatransone in the Province of Ascoli Piceno, located some of those remaining vines and began the methodical, unhurried work of recovery. It took the better part of three decades before Pecorino had a DOCG to call its own. It now has three appellations covering it across two regions, and sommeliers who discovered it in the past five years have largely kept that discovery to themselves.

This is, to be precise, the condition that Pecorino occupies in the Anglo-American wine market: known to the right people, absent from most wine lists, and carrying none of the prestige freight that Italian whites must generally earn through Soave or Vernaccia or Greco di Tufo before buyers pay attention. The irony is that Pecorino, more than most of those varieties, actually rewards the kind of close attention that serious sommeliers like to pay. It has structure. It has acidity. It has an aromatic profile that is both specific and versatile. And it ages, which is still the wrong thing to say about an Italian white if you want a quick sale, but entirely true.

The Name and the Sheep

Pecorino takes its name from pecora, the Italian word for sheep, and there are two competing explanations for why. The first, and more romantic, holds that the ripening clusters were a preferred target of the transhumant sheep flocks that moved through the central Apennines each autumn, descending from the summer highlands toward the coastal plains of the Adriatic. Shepherds who arrived at a vineyard to find the lower clusters stripped would have had reason to remember the grape's name. The second explanation is calendrical: the vendemmia for Pecorino traditionally coincided with the period of the transhumance, so the grape and the sheep became associated in the seasonal memory of the people who farmed both.

Neither explanation is mutually exclusive, and both are more interesting than the confusion the name generates at wine fairs, where Pecorino the grape must be distinguished, repeatedly and with patience, from Pecorino the cheese. The grape has no derivation from dairy. It is, notably, not a sheep milk product. Wine buyers who need this clarified in writing have generally not been spending enough time with the Marche.

What the name does not tell you is anything about the variety's genetic relationships. Pecorino is not closely related to any of the major central Italian whites; ampelographic research suggests it is a local indigenous variety specific to the Apennine foothills, without clear parentage among the named varieties of Umbria or Lazio. This independence of origin is consistent with its flavor profile, which resembles no other Italian white grape closely enough to invite easy comparison.

Recovery

Guido Cocci Grifoni did not set out to save a variety in 1982 so much as to understand what was growing in the neglected corners of old estates near the Sibillini. What he found were vines that nobody had been tending with commercial intent for decades: surviving specimens of Pecorino that had persisted not because of any institutional protection but because the terrain they occupied was too steep or too remote to have been replanted with higher-yielding, easier varieties after the agricultural upheaval of the postwar years.

The recovery was slow by design. Cocci Grifoni propagated cuttings, identified the most productive and healthy specimens, and over the following years began building a nursery population sufficient for commercial planting. By the late 1980s, a small number of estates in the southern Marche were trialling Pecorino in their vineyards. The wines they produced circulated quietly among producers; they did not, in any meaningful sense, reach the market until the 1990s.

The formal recognition of Pecorino's quality came in stages. The Falerio DOC, covering the hills around Ascoli Piceno, incorporated Pecorino into its regulations as early as the 1970s, but in a blending role rather than as a lead variety. The Colli Maceratesi DOC similarly permitted it. The decisive moment was 2011, when the Offida DOCG was established and Pecorino was named as the exclusive white variety of the zone: Offida Pecorino DOCG requires a minimum of 85% Pecorino, and the great majority of producers use 100%.

The Abruzzo Pecorino DOC, established in 2010, gave the variety formal recognition across the border in Abruzzo, where producers in the Colline Pescaresi and Teramane zones had begun planting it in earnest during the 1990s. Abruzzo's warmer, drier conditions produce Pecorino of a richer style than the Marche; more body, more stone fruit, somewhat lower acidity. Both expressions are worth knowing. They are not interchangeable.

What Offida Means for Pecorino

The Offida DOCG is geographically compact: thirteen municipalities in the southern Marche, Province of Ascoli Piceno, occupying the hills between the Adriatic coast and the Sibillini Mountains. The zone sits at approximately 290 to 450 meters above sea level, with clay-loam soils and a climate that combines continental seasonality with the moderating influence of the Adriatic. Diurnal temperature variation during the growing season is significant: warm afternoons give phenolic ripeness, cool nights preserve acidity. This combination is precisely what Pecorino requires to achieve the balance that makes it interesting.

Those who have read our piece on Offida's red wines will recognize the terroir: it is the same zone that produces the estate's Offida Rosso from Montepulciano, under the same DOCG umbrella. The white and red denominations share an appellation name and a soil type; they produce wines of entirely different character. The Pecorino, grown on the steeper, better-draining sites, is leaner and more mineral. The Montepulciano, planted on the deeper clay plots, is darker and more structured. The producers who make both tend to be the most confident in the zone, because each variety demands a different understanding of the same landscape.

La Valle del Sole, the organic estate in Offida whose Rosso DOCG has received Gambero Rosso recognition in consecutive editions, also produces a Pecorino from the same hillside. The sisters Alessia and Valeria Di Nicolò have farmed these soils organically since 1989; their approach to the white variety is consistent with their philosophy on the red: no corrections, no shortcuts, no chemistry where none is required. The resulting Pecorino carries the site's mineral signature as clearly as the Montepulciano does.

The Abruzzo Expression

South of the Marche, in the foothills behind Pescara and Teramo, the Pecorino story takes a warmer turn. Abruzzo's producers, working with the same variety on calcareous soils at lower average altitude, produce wines that are broader and more immediately giving: more tropical fruit alongside the stone fruit, a rounder texture, and acidity that is still present but less insistent. The structure remains, which is what distinguishes Pecorino from Trebbiano d'Abruzzo or Falanghina in the same cellar; but the overall impression is of a slightly more accessible wine.

The Abruzzo Pecorino DOC has attracted considerable investment since its establishment in 2010, and production has expanded rapidly. This expansion brings the usual complications: the quality range in Abruzzo Pecorino is now wide, from genuinely serious wines from producers who planted thirty years ago to technically adequate, high-volume bottlings that give the grape no particular credit. The Marche, with the DOCG's more rigorous standards and the appellation's smaller size, has maintained a more consistent floor. One might argue that Offida Pecorino and Abruzzo Pecorino are, at this point, usefully understood as two related but distinct wines from producers with different objectives.

At the Table

The food pairing logic for Pecorino follows directly from its structure. The acidity makes it useful across a wider range of dishes than most Italian whites; the almond and citrus profile makes it specific enough to reward deliberate matching. Raw Adriatic seafood: crudo of orata, clams in their liquid, scallops with nothing more than olive oil and lemon. This is the obvious answer, and it is the right one. The salinity in Pecorino has an affinity with brine that few other white grapes can replicate. On the Marche coast, this pairing is not a suggestion; it is the local assumption.

The more interesting territory is inland. Pecorino with a plate of vincigrassi, the Marche's layered baked pasta with slow-cooked meat ragù and truffle, works because the grape's acidity cuts through the richness in the same way a well-structured Sangiovese does, while the aromatic precision of the white avoids the tannin clash that the red sometimes creates with the pasta's egg content. Aged sheep's milk cheese, Pecorino di Fossa specifically, the variety buried in tufa pits in Sogliano al Rubicone each August and disinterred in November, emerging pungent and funky and extraordinary: perhaps the most logical pairing of all, given the shared etymological root. Whether this constitutes terroir or coincidence is left as an exercise for the buyer.

By the glass, Pecorino works at the start of a meal and through the first courses; it does not require the guest to wait for a second bottle when the fish arrives. For wine directors building Italian-focused lists, it is a credible answer to the question of what to pour between the sparkling and the reds, and it is a more defensible answer than the generic Pinot Grigio that occupies that position on most lists in the English-speaking world.

The grape has spent forty years being recovered, documented, regulated, and refined. It is now at the point where the wines it produces are ready to carry the weight of serious restaurant placement. That most buyers have not caught up with this fact is, for the moment, an advantage to those who have.