Cantina Tollo: The Abruzzo Co-op That Pays for Quality, Not Quantity

Say the word cooperative to a wine buyer and watch their face do something small and disappointed. Decades of cheap co-op bulk trained the trade to expect the same thing every time: many hands, a low bar, a wine nobody remembers by the second glass. It is a fair thing to have learned and a lazy thing to keep assuming, and Cantina Tollo is the estate that keeps making the assumption look foolish.

Tollo is big in exactly the way the reflex warns you about. Founded in 1960 in a stretch of Abruzzo the countryside was busy abandoning, it now gathers 625 wine-growing families farming 2,500 hectares between the Adriatic and the Maiella, and it turns out 14 million bottles a year. That is not a boutique. That is a small town that happens to make wine, and by the old logic it should taste like it. The vineyards sit at around 150 metres, six kilometres from the sea and thirty from a mountain that climbs to nearly 2,800 metres, which is why there can be snow on the Maiella and the Gran Sasso while people are on the beach below.

I met the range not in Tollo (unfortunately) but through a screen, at a virtual tasting hosted by Studio Cru. Five wines, poured in order: three whites, a rose and a red, moving from a Pecorino that only exists because somebody went looking for it, to a Montepulciano Riserva built to age. Here is what was in each glass, and what a co-op this size does to earn its place in it.

Tendone: The Pergola Abruzzo Nearly Threw Away

Most of those vines grow on tendone, and it is worth a minute of your time because it quietly explains how these wines taste. Tendone is the Abruzzo pergola. Instead of training the vine into a neat vertical hedge, the canopy is stretched flat overhead on a frame at roughly head height, so you walk underneath it and the grapes hang down into the shade, under a roof made of the vine's own leaves. For most of the last fifty years that was the unfashionable choice. Pergola is expensive to build, slow to prune, impossible to mechanise, and it carried the reputation of the postwar decades when Abruzzo cropped oceans of thin Trebbiano off exactly that system. Ambitious growers ripped it out and put in Guyot. Then the summers got hotter, and the thing everybody had abandoned turned out to be the answer: fruit under a canopy does not scorch, it holds onto its acidity, and it ripens later and more evenly than fruit sitting in a hedge taking the afternoon sun on the shoulder. Growers across Abruzzo are putting pergola back in. Tollo on the other hand never took it out. If an overhead canopy sounds familiar, it should: the Veneto trains vines the same way under the Bellussera, though the two are kin rather than the same thing, different frames built in different centuries for different problems.

Vigneto Avanzato: Paid by the Hectare, Not the Tonne

The obvious question is why a cooperative keeps it. Pergola costs more to build and more to work, and a co-op of 625 families is exactly the sort of place where that expense gets cut first. It does not, and the reason is a single decision most cooperatives never make. Back in 2000, Tollo stopped paying its growers for the weight of fruit they delivered and started paying them for the hectares they tend. It calls the model Vigneto Avanzato, the advanced vineyard, and before you assume this is simply how Italian co-ops work now, it is not. It is Tollo's own invention, not a regional habit and not an industry standard, which is exactly why it is worth pointing at. Flip that one incentive and everything downstream changes. A grower paid by the hectare has no reason to chase volume and every reason to chase ripeness, healthy fruit and low yields, and the winery's agronomists get to make the calls in the vineyard instead of pleading for them. Green harvesting, cluster thinning, dropping perfectly good fruit on the floor in August: try selling any of that to a grower who is paid by the tonne. The model still pulls new land in, too. In 2026 the group took on another 133 hectares from growers who wanted the deal, all of it planted to native varieties. And the Berliner Wine Trophy has named Tollo the best cooperative in Italy for eight years running, from 2019 to 2026, and I can see why, it is impressive. Wished I could visit the Cantina myself and see all of it with my own eyes.

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1. The Cantina Tollo agronomists walking amongst the tendone pergola trained vines.
2. A wide green Abruzzo valley, vineyard blocks stepping down the far slope.

The Incentive That Changed the Fruit

The story starts with an empty landscape. In 1960 the Abruzzo countryside was emptying out, its young people leaving for the cities and the factories, and the vineyards were one of the few things still worth staying for. The growers around Tollo did the sensible thing and pooled their fruit, their risk and their bargaining power into a cooperative. That is the unglamorous origin of most co-ops, and for most of them the story ends at survival. Tollo kept going.

The pay model is only half of it. The other half sits in the research plots, where Tollo spends real money on grapes that no market is asking for, yet. The clearest example is a variety almost nobody has heard of.

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1. Maiolica, the Abruzzo red recovered from a germplasm bank.
2. The seventeenth-century majolica of San Donato at Castelli, the ceramic the label was modelled on.
3. The sea is six kilometres away, and you can taste it.

Maiolica is an old Abruzzo red the region simply stopped growing. It appears in the Ampelographic Bulletin of 1875 and again in an 1892 survey of Abruzzese varieties, and then it more or less vanishes, squeezed out by Montepulciano and by the postwar appetite for volume. What saved it was a freezer. Cuttings had survived in the germplasm bank at Conegliano Veneto, the institute that keeps genetic material of varieties nobody is planting any more, and Tollo was among the first wineries to take rootstock and put it back in the ground, in 2019. The first commercial vintage reached the market in 2021. The wine is pale ruby and light on its feet, macerated wild strawberry and raspberry, silky tannins, more nerve than weight. Even the label is local: a tile made by the ceramist Lorenzo Di Stefano, modelled on the seventeenth-century majolica ceiling of the little church of San Donato at Castelli, which Carlo Levi once called the Sistine Chapel of majolica. A cooperative with 625 members did not have to do any of that, and that is what makes them not fall into the stereotype of what is most known as a co-op.

The scale is genuinely large. The wider group, which also includes Feudo Antico, the organic-focused Auramadre and the everyday label Borgovenna, farms vineyards that run from the Adriatic coast up toward the Maiella, and the wines reach every Italian region, much of Europe, and Canada as the main market overseas. Gianluca Orsini is president. Riccardo Brighigna is the oenologist, and he has supervised the winemaking here since 2003, which counts for more than it sounds like: twenty-odd vintages in one cellar is how a house style stops being an accident. Roughly 315 of those 2,500 hectares are farmed organically. None of that is boutique. All of it is aimed, unusually for the category, at the top of the glass rather than the bottom of the price list, I might add.

The organic conversion is older than the marketing. Tollo began farming organically at the end of the 1990s, before the word meant anything at the till, at a point when shoppers assumed an organic wine was a worse one. It was the first in Abruzzo and among the first in Italy to be certified. Today around a tenth of production is organic, and one of the five wines tasted comes off it.

A Roman Villa Under the Vines

Feudo Antico is the part of the story that sounds invented. In 2013, when the team was preparing the soil to replant Pecorino, the digging turned up walls. Not a wall. Walls: the remains of a Roman villa rustica, a working country estate built into the slope, so it looked out over the valley and the sea at once. Instead of paving it over and getting on with the planting, they stopped, called in the archaeological superintendency, and built the winery around the dig.

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1. The Roman villa rustica under the glass pavilion at Feudo Antico, uncovered in 2013. Image: VirtuQuotidiane
2. Feudo Antico in Contrada San Pietro, the Tullum DOCG home of the group.

And you can go and look at it. The headquarters that opened in 2021 is the first example in Italy of a museum built inside a working cellar, with the remains sitting directly underneath it. What is down there is a wine farm. A large cistern in Roman concrete with its overflow channel running off it, a smaller one below to catch the spill, and an inclined, waterproofed floor that is the base of a torcularium, a press, sloped so whatever ran out of the grapes or the olives collected at the bottom. There is a cell holding the housings of seven dolia, the enormous clay jars Romans fermented and stored wine in, still sitting in their concrete beds. There is a room with a mosaic floor of white limestone tesserae framed in black, pottery from the republican era through to the sixth century, and a coin that probably carries the emperor Probus. The excavation is still going. People made wine on this ground and stored it in clay two thousand years before anybody thought to give the place a DOCG.

Italy's 75th DOCG, and One of Its Smallest

The wines that come off it carry the Tullum DOCG, and the appellation is worth knowing. Tullum, also called Terre Tollesi, was created as a DOC in 2008 and promoted to Italy's 75th DOCG in 2019, and it is one of the smallest denominations in the country, its vineyards drawn entirely inside the Tollo municipality. The rules are strict: a red must be at least 95 percent Montepulciano, a white at least 90 percent Passerina or Pecorino. About 22 hectares, sold almost entirely to restaurants, which I totally get, after having tasted their Passerina, for Tollo it's a research bench.

Pecorino, The Grape That Came Back

The flight opened with Peco, a straight Pecorino, and it needs a word about the grape first, because Pecorino is one of the great comeback stories in Italian wine. By the 1980s it was effectively extinct in commercial terms, ripped out across Abruzzo in the postwar rush for high-yielding Trebbiano, down to less than a single hectare before a handful of growers coaxed it back. Today it covers thousands, and Tollo was among the first wineries to replant it, at the very end of the last century. Ask for a local white in an Abruzzo restaurant now and Pecorino is what tends to arrive, where a generation ago it would almost certainly have been Trebbiano. Trebbiano still covers more ground in the region than any other white, but it is no longer the grape Abruzzo leads with.

Peco is the straight expression of it. Destemmed and crushed, given a cold soak to draw the aromatics off the skins, pressed softly, then left six months on its own yeasts with the malolactic deliberately blocked so nothing rounds off the edges. No oak, nothing borrowed, no cleverness. The brief is to get out of the grape's way. Brighigna was blunt about the 2025 when we tasted it: it is not at its peak, and it wants another year in bottle. He is right. It is already very good, which tells you where the bar sits around here.

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1. Pecorino, the Abruzzo white that was nearly lost and is now the region's calling card.
2. Passerina, one of the three varieties behind Tullum DOCG.
3. Montepulciano, the black grape that carries most of Abruzzo.

Passerina, A White with a Long Memory

The second glass had an address. This is the Passerina off Feudo Antico, the Tullum DOCG wine, and the grape has a quiet comeback of its own behind it: an old Abruzzo variety that very nearly slipped out of use before growers came back to it. It is the last white the region picks, going into the press only once the Pecorino and the Trebbiano are safely in. Feudo Antico treats it like a serious wine rather than a summer one: a cold maceration, a cool fermentation in steel, then around six months resting on its fine lees, the spent yeast cells that give it weight and texture. That is a lot of patience for a grape most of the world has still hardly heard of.

It also rewards a year in bottle, which almost nobody expects from a wine like this. The fruit steps back, a nuttiness arrives, and the mineral line sharpens. Passerina and Pecorino are the two Abruzzo whites climbing hardest on international lists right now, and twenty years ago you could not have given either of them away.

The Everyday White, Done Properly

The third glass was the least expensive of the five, at around 12 euro, and it is the one I want to argue about. Hedos Bianco is a Terre d'Abruzzo blend, mostly Pecorino with a small proportion of Cococciola (pronounced as ko-ko-CHO-la), a high-acid local white that Tollo reaches for in the hottest vintages precisely because it keeps its freshness when other grapes lose theirs. Neither grape is aromatic, so the aromatics have to be built in the cellar: several hours of cold skin contact before fermentation to lift the thiols, the compounds our noses read as grapefruit and tropical fruit, with the Cococciola picked later for that bit of floral edginess.

What I liked was that nobody pretended otherwise. It does not show the precision of the grape variety, Brighigna said, and that is not the mission of this wine. That is a rare thing to hear said out loud, and I love that! Most producers talk about every bottle they own in the language they keep for the flagship, and the gap between the language and the liquid is the reason buyers stop listening. This one knows exactly what it is for: an easy, well made white at around 12 euro, aimed at younger drinkers and at people still finding their way into wine, and made with the same care as the wines poured either side of it.

A Cerasuolo Rose with a Straight Face

Two of the five wines are made from the same grape, so it is worth stopping on it for a moment. Montepulciano is Abruzzo's grape and, after Sangiovese, the second most planted red variety in Italy. Montepulciano is a thick-skinned, late-ripening, deeply coloured, generous grape, with dark cherry and plum fruit, moderate in acidity, and capable of a tannin that turns silky rather than scratchy if you handle it gently. Rush it and it goes green and hard, which is how the region earned a reputation it is only just shaking off. And because those skins are thick and the colour comes out fast, Abruzzo learned to do something else with it: leave the juice on the skins for a few hours instead of a few weeks and you get a pink wine with real substance. That wine has a name of its own.

Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo is the one most likely to be misread. It is a rose, made from Montepulciano, and you will not find the word rose anywhere on the bottle, because it does not need it. Cerasuolo is its own appellation and its own colour word: cerasa is the local word for cherry, and the wine is named after the shade, not the category.

The appellation is worth knowing, because it is genuinely unusual. Cerasuolo was made under the Montepulciano d'Abruzzo DOC rules from 1968 onward, treated as a variation on the red. Then in 2010 it was cut loose and given a denomination of its own, Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo DOC, making it the first appellation in Italy created for a rose on its own terms rather than as the red's little sister. The recipe follows the red: at least 85 percent Montepulciano. Brighigna calls it the Tavel of Abruzzo, and yeah I get it, he means it as a compliment and a 'warning' at once. Tavel is the small southern Rhone appellation that also makes nothing but pink wine, also with real structure, and he says the two get confused in blind tastings often enough that he has stopped being surprised by it. His, he reckons, is the more mineral of the pair. I'm going to say, just try it for yourself.

What matters commercially is that this is not a bleed-off from the red tanks. It has vineyards of its own.

There is a short pre-fermentation skin contact, put there deliberately to pull enough phenolic structure for a subtle tannic grip, then a cool fermentation in steel. Tollo files the wine under Insetti, their organic line, where every label carries a different insect. The insect is their organic-indicator: if it is living in the vineyard, the vineyard is not being sprayed to death. If the insect survives, Brighigna says, it is because we reduced the chemicals.

Now, and Later

The tasting closed with Mo, the Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Riserva, and the name works twice. 'Mo' is the first two letters of Montepulciano. It is also Abruzzo dialect for 'now, immediately, this instant. Which is a fair description of a wine built to be opened tonight and equally happy being forgotten in a cellar for the best part of a decade.

It is 100 percent Montepulciano off an old-vine selection, and that phrase gets thrown around so casually it has almost stopped meaning anything, so let me tell you is what it actually buys you at Cantina Tollo. Gor a cooperative that has to produce a Riserva every single year is not a romantic detail, it is the entire game. Tollo picks these plots off limestone and sand, keeps them for its best Montepulciano, and harvests them in October, later than everything else.

What happens in the cellar afterwards is more interesting than the paperwork suggests, and Brighigna said as much himself on the call: a technical sheet only carries the part of the method that never changes, because the rest of it moves with the vintage. Extraction is gentle and the pump-overs are deliberately soft. The yeast goes in alongside the lactic bacteria rather than after them, a small technical choice whose only purpose is to keep the fruit tasting clean. No press wine is used at all, only free run, the juice that comes off under the fruit's own weight without squeezing the skins, which is where the polish comes from and a good part of the cost too. Then large casks, partly 500-litre French oak already on its third or fourth wine so the oak stays quiet, and a variable spell in concrete before bottling.

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1. Five-hundred-litre casks already on their third or fourth wine, so the oak stays quiet.
2. The patient half of the cellar, large old botti stacked two high.

The result is why Brighigna reaches for Rioja as his comparison, and he does not mean the flavour. He means the readiness. A Rioja Reserva arrives on the shelf already drinkable, the tannins settled, nothing left for you to do but pull the cork. That is what he is after here: a serious Montepulciano that does not ask ten years of your patience first. In the glass it is intense ruby with a violet cast, the tannins already softening and very fine, chalky rather than drying. It carries its 14 percent without heat, and it will hold eight to ten years. This is the wine that shows the co-op's capability, made at a volume that ought to make it impossible.

Cooperative Is Not a Quality Grade

Five glasses in, the reflex looks a bit silly. The whites were precise, the rose had a backbone, the Riserva had depth, and not one of them tasted like a compromise struck between 625 growers. That is not luck, and I don't think it is genius either. It is what happens when a co-op decides, a long time ago, to pay for care instead of tonnage, and then quietly keeps its word for sixty-odd years, grape by grape, from a rescued Maiolica to a DOCG grown on a Roman floor. It is a lot of people doing unglamorous things well, for a very long time.

It is also worth knowing how much of Abruzzo this covers. Around 85 percent of the region's winemaking is done by cooperatives. Write the structure off and you have written off most of a region, including two of the most interesting white grapes coming out of Italy right now, because a great deal of the Pecorino and Passerina reaching export markets passes through a co-op cellar on the way.

The lesson travels well beyond Abruzzo. Cooperative is not a quality grade anymore, it is an ownership structure, and the only thing that reliably predicts what is in the bottle is what the people behind it decided to reward. Tollo, in my opinion rewards the right things.

If you are in the Netherlands and want to try these for yourself, SoloVino imports Cantina Tollo here, which Brunella di Pentima confirmed on the call when asked.

This tasting was organised by Studio Cru.

Proof I did my homework

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Peco Pecorino Terre d'Abruzzo IGP 2025

91/100

Cantina Tollo, Abruzzo

Passerina Tullum DOCG 2024

93/100

Feudo Antico, Tullum DOCG, Abruzzo

Hedos Bianco Terre d'Abruzzo IGP

92/100

Cantina Tollo, Abruzzo

Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo DOP Organic 2025

95/100

Cantina Tollo, Abruzzo

Mo Montepulciano d'Abruzzo DOP Riserva 2020

95/100

Cantina Tollo, Abruzzo

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Proof I did my homework: Peco Pecorino Terre d'Abruzzo IGP 2025 (91/100) · Passerina Tullum DOCG 2024 (93/100) · Hedos Bianco Terre d'Abruzzo IGP (92/100) · Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo DOP Organic 2025 (95/100) · Mo Montepulciano d'Abruzzo DOP Riserva 2020 (95/100).

My Personal Tasting Notes

All five wines in the order they were poured. Scores follow the 100-point wine scoring scale and reflect my own personal assessment during the tasting.

Written by

Margot van Lieshout DipWSET FWS RV

Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.

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