Tollo, Abruzzo out to conquer the world

Tollo, the cooperative of Abruzzo

Many of the cooperatives of the Abruzzo region are concentrated in the province of Chieti. In this crowded scene, the Tollo winery plays a fundamental role; certainly for its impressive numbers (2,700 hectares of vineyards, many of which are organically grown, about 700 members, 13 million bottles) but also for the entrepreneurial project which has undergone an impressive acceleration with the latest harvests. "It was a complex 2022 from certain points of view," explains Andrea Di Fabio, General Manager at Tollo, "because an upward spiral of costs set in with clear repercussions on margins. Despite this, however, our turnover continues to grow, mainly thanks to exports." Up until a few years ago, most of the company's bottles were sold on the domestic market, but today things have changed: "the growth on international markets this past year was +51% compared to the previous one: we worked very hard to achieve this goal." To convince the markets, Tollo implemented a very coherent commercial policy, proposing products with an advantageous relationship between quality and price: "we are convinced that to drink a good glass of wine it is not necessary to spend a fortune."

Tollo's wines

But there are other factors that have led to this success: "we worked on human resources, often with young people who started with us and whom we trained and who then asserted themselves by bringing very interesting results. Last but not least in terms of importance, I believe we have taken the right path by not indulging in market trends but rather we increasingly provided very authentic interpretations of our wines." The house champion is always the Montepulciano Mo Riserva, this year proposed in the 2018 version, Tre Bicchieri in Vini d'Italia 2023: "since its first release in 2011, it was the wine that marked the style change in our winery. It was our first Riserva to mature in large casks and not in barriques, precisely to ensure that Montepulciano could be expressed more truthfully." And it is certainly also thanks to this iconic grape that last November a prestigious magazine such as Wine Enthusiast awarded Abruzzo as wine region of the year: "I think that the quality characteristics of our grapes are now out there for all to see. We are one of the more productive regions, true, but we must begin to distinguish between non-differentiated production and quality productions.The latter have the advantage of often being offered at fair prices, i.e. remunerative for the producer and convenient for the consumer. This is why we are now one of the most present Italian regions in the world."