Torre dei Beati

In the hilltop town of Loreto Aprutino, in Abruzzo’s Vestina subregion, Torre dei Beati has become one of the region’s defining voices for native Italian varieties. Fausto Albanesi and his wife Adriana founded the estate in 1999, converting vineyards planted by Adriana’s father Rocco in 1972 to organic farming, with their first bottle released in 2000. What began as a creative escape from their day jobs — Fausto as an engineer, Adriana as an accountant — grew over seventeen years into one of Abruzzo’s most respected, terroir-driven producers.

The name comes from a detail in a fourteenth-century fresco in the nearby church of Santa Maria in Piano, depicting souls on Judgment Day making their way to the Torre dei Beati — the Tower of the Blessed, the destination reached only through diligence and effort. That image has become the estate’s guiding metaphor: careful, rigorous work in pursuit of the truest expression of Loreto Aprutino’s native grapes.

The estate now farms twenty-one hectares, all in Loreto Aprutino, at elevations between 250 and 300 meters, roughly twenty-five kilometers from the Adriatic coast, on the first slopes rising toward the Tavo creek and, beyond it, the 3,000-meter peak of the Gran Sasso d’Italia, the highest mountain in the Apennines. Sea breezes off the Adriatic bring daytime warmth, while cool night air descending from the Gran Sasso creates the dramatic diurnal swings that give the wines their vibrancy, freshness, and balance. The soils here are calcareous clay, rich in skeleton, shaping wines defined more by freshness, complexity, and elegance than by weight or richness.

The focus stays firmly on Abruzzo’s own grapes — Montepulciano first and foremost, alongside Trebbiano d’Abruzzo and Pecorino, a variety Torre dei Beati was among the very first Abruzzo estates to champion.  It’s wine made the way Fausto describes the land itself — never steep or harsh, but patient, considered, and true to where it comes from.