Sabatino di Properzio’s Montepulciano is as stylish as his labels. While this may sound like a contradiction for a grape more often associated with rough-and-ready country wine, Sabatino has set out to prove otherwise, using low yields, old vines and increasingly organic viticulture to wring new depths from the DOC. The ‘basic’ Montepulciano, if it can be called that, sees little oak and is an intense, civilized representation of the grape’s myriad fruit and spice flavours. Spelt is a selection of top fruit from fifteen hectares of vineyards, given a longer maceration and eighteen months in oak, making for a more complex, structured wine for drinking a little bit older. Belvedere, meanwhile, is a single two-hectare vineyard that yields low sumptuously concentrated fruit and regularly demonstrates the brilliance to which Montepulciano can aspire.