Cantine San Marzano 62 Anniversario Reserva 2018

62 Anniversario is a red wine made by Cantine San Marzano with the Primitivo variety in the Puglia region of Italy. It is perhaps the wine with the greatest aging pretensions of this great Italian winery. The vines from which it comes are over sixty years old and are cultivated in goblets, on red clay soils with a high iron content and a limestone subsoil. It is harvested by hand, fermented in stainless steel and then aged for eighteen months in French and American oak barrels. The story of San Marzano is not very different from many stories of agriculture or grape growing: an attempt to escape poverty. Poverty of arid lands, punished by the summer sun in this case and of a value of production that does not justify the work of the land. This is how San Marzano begins in 1962, when nineteen winegrowers decide to join forces to have some power in the negotiations for the sale of grapes, must or wine obtained with hard manual labor on the heel of the Italian boot. Twenty years have to go by for the management to professionalize and make the leap, often a leap, to bottling. This fruit of the land is no longer a fruit, a must, a wine without identification, but a brand: San Marzano. And very shortly after that comes the wine that put Puglia on the map: Sessantani. The creation of the Manduria Primitivo denomination of origin and the links with the Californian Zinfandel that became fashionable in the United States did the rest. Today Cantine San Marzano is a great Italian winery and its wines are in every corner of the world. An icon. A story of overcoming.