Along came Ampelo and suddenly Salento is no longer a mere spring feeding the vast wine lake of Europe but instead a gifted place proving its mettle with a most serious red.  Ampelo is a varietal red made from the Malvasia Nera, the red variety that usually lends its inky depth to southerly blends.  Harmonizing with the regional blends of Primitivo and Negroamaro, Malvasia Nera is always credited with a deep color and floral aromatics but largely underestimated beyond that role.  Further north in Tuscany, Malvasia Nera has been supplanted as the current vogue favors Cabernet Sauvignon for their blends with Sangiovese -perhaps because they too know not what they have on hand.  Blends be damned -Malvasia Nera deserves its place in the sun as a varietal wine.  Embodying the best of the variety, Ampelo shows us what Malvasia Nera can do: lifted floral top notes are grounded by deep, chocolate low notes that carry cherries deep into your nose.  Dry and round, the palate echoes with black cherries, dark plums, fine textured tannins, and a well integrated acidity that keeps the whole of the palate in a polished tension that's balanced all the way down.

So there we were on the patio chatting between bites and sipping sparkling wines, Mosel Rieslings, complex Chateauneuf-du-Pape, and savory Riserva Rioja among other things and which of all these wines garners the most attention and is emptied before the rest?  Ampelo; a first opportunity at varietal Malvasia Nera and a paradigm shift in a bottle.  Since then, I've quietly dropped this among many lineups to find similar results and I laugh now to think that less than a year ago I didn't even rate the reds of Apulia -what a merry surprise and one about which I feel the world should know.