In order to dig away the water immediately and malignant assumptions - the rather unhappily chosen name Primitivo is not derived from a supposedly banal taste of the grape variety, but from the fact that it previously drives out (great) as others blooms, turns and turns ripening. Mimmo Caragnano from Pantun reads the grapes for his flagship, for example in the last week of August and the Skietto (due to the cooler conditions) in the first week of September.
Nevertheless: Compared to her doppelganger in Croatia - from where the variety probably came to Italy - with the name Crljenak Kastelianski, she actually caught it quite well. Apart from the Croatian tongue breaker, Primitivo is also identical to the California Zinfandel, from which some American patriots mean that it is an autochthonous American grape variety - a completely absurd and hair -raising claim that should immediately contribute to membership in the Republican Party they all historical and scientific knowledge.
Primitivo should have arrived in Apulia around 1700. It then established itself in the area around Gioia di Colle and Mottola - where her best versions are currently coming into the bottle - spread out relatively quickly throughout Apulia, where today it is the quantitative second grape variety with over 10,000 hectares of vineyards behind Negroamaro . Unlike what could be assumed due to these numbers, she is neither in the vineyard nor in the basement. It is sensitive to the weather and tends to accumulate too much sugar at an early stage.
The right choice of layers is therefore of crucial importance for the quality of the wines - and in fact there are obvious differences between the elegant and cool primitivos of the Gioia del Colle lying on a limestone base on a limestone base and the opulent and soft interpretations from the lower vineyards of the Manduria. If you do everything right at Primitivo, powerful and elegant wines are created that build on dark aromas (berries, liquorice, earth) and do not have too scarce alcohol, but integrate it into a structuring and balancing corset of tannin and acidity.