Puglia Wine

Puglia forms the heel of Italy's boot, and its hot, dry Mediterranean climate has made it one of the country's most productive wine regions, historically supplying bulk wine for blending elsewhere before a shift toward quality bottling in recent decades. Primitivo is the region's signature grape, genetically identical to Zinfandel despite arriving in Italy centuries earlier, producing deeply coloured, high-alcohol reds with ripe, jammy fruit. Primitivo di Manduria, the region's best-known DOC, sets the benchmark for the variety, while Salento further south offers a cooler, more coastal take on the same grape. For Primitivo specifically, Primitivo covers examples from beyond Puglia too. For the wider Italian range, Italian Wine covers everything else on offer.