You write
An email with the day you would like and how many of you there are. We reply with two or three possible times.
A closed cellar
Tridente is in no wine shop, no restaurant, no online store. We do not ship, export, or work with distributors. Whoever wants this wine drives up to Atri, walks into the cellar, tastes it, and carries the bottles out by hand.
That is a choice, not a limitation. Three thousand bottles a year barely cover the people who come in person, and a wine drunk where it was born says far more than a wine found on a shelf.
Every bottle has a name
There are no supermarket labels here, because there is no supermarket. The label is a sheet of deckle-edged parchment with the crest in relief and your name written by hand in ink, alongside the bottle number, the vintage and the date of collection. On request, the same text is engraved straight into the glass.
How you end up with a bottle
You visit
An hour and a half: the old vineyard on the ridge, the cellar under the hill, and a tasting of all three wines.
You choose
How many bottles, and which form of personalisation: handwritten parchment, embossed leather, or engraved glass.
You sign
Your name goes into the register next to the bottle number. From then on that bottle is yours, even if it stays in the cellar waiting for you.
The legend of the Trident
Three prongs: the sea, the hill, the hand that harvests. In Atri the trident has been carved for three thousand years — on coins, on amphorae, on doorways. This is the story that stuck to it.
289 BC
The god who named the sea
Hatria minted its own coin before Rome did, stamped with the face of Hadranus, god of the waters. From his name, they say, comes the name of the Adriatic. The growers on the hill poured the first amphora of each harvest into the sea; the rest they branded with a trident, so they could be told apart among a thousand others at the port of Matrinum.
1395
Thirty-five thousand ducats
Atri is sold for thirty-five thousand ducats to Antonio Acquaviva, the first of nineteen dukes. Beneath the ducal palace, in Roman cisterns cut in the fourth century BC, the dark wine of the hill finds its cellar. From that day it is no longer a farmer’s wine: it is a court’s wine, and it is not sold — it is given.
1481
The gift that travels
Ferrante of Aragon, King of Naples, grants the Acquaviva the right to add the royal house’s name to their own. From Atri then travel the gifts that keep alliances alive: liquorice, Pan Ducale, and casks marked with the trident. The cellar ledgers record no producer, only three words: vino di Hatria.
1734
Madrid, Naples, Versailles
The Kingdom of Naples passes to the Bourbons, and the crates from Abruzzo follow the family ties: to the court of Spain, where the wine of Hatria had already arrived with the Aragonese, and to that of France. At Versailles, they say, it was called le vin du trident, and no one could point to its homeland on a map. Every crate bore the name of the person meant to receive it — a habit we never lost.
2019
The mark returns
One and a half hectares of Montepulciano planted in 1948, on the ridge of the clay badlands. No herbicide, yields of eighteen hectolitres, grapes left to dry on the vine until the bunch weighs almost nothing. In the first year we filled thirteen hundred bottles and handed them over one by one to the people who had come all the way up here.
Atri, and the land that crumbles
The calanchi of Atri are a seabed left high and dry: blue clay, salt, seashells half a metre from the roots. The soil slides every winter, and every winter the vines hold it back. On one side the Gran Sasso, on the other the Adriatic fifteen kilometres away: mountain air falls at night, salt wind rises by day. That daily swing is what keeps the acidity inside a grape that ripens to sixteen degrees.
1948
The year the old vineyard was planted, ungrafted, from massal selection.
380 m
The height of the ridge, with the sea in sight from every row.
18 hl/ha
Less than one bottle per vine. The rest is dropped on the ground in June.
3.000
Bottles of Tridente per vintage, every one collected by hand at the cellar.
The three wines
All three are tasted during the visit, in the order they came into being.
Tridente
Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Colline Teramane DOCG Riserva
Single-plot Montepulciano, nothing else. Partial drying on the vine, fermentation with the vineyard’s own yeasts, twenty-six months in new French barriques. Unfiltered, unfined. A dense wine, almost chewable, that in its youth recalls Amarone and at twenty years recalls nothing but itself.
- Vineyard1948, 1,5 ha
- Yield18 hl/ha
- Ageing26 months
- Alcohol16% vol
- Bottles3.000
Matrinum
Montepulciano d’Abruzzo DOC
The younger vines of the same ridge, raised in steel and large oak. Dark fruit, salt, and the straight tannin of Montepulciano with no wood covering it. This is the one we drink ourselves, at the table, every day.
Hadranus
Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo DOC Superiore
A rosé from a single night on the skins, the colour of pomegranate. Taut and saline, with the bitterness of cherry skin on the finish. It was made for the Adriatic fish landed fifteen kilometres below.
