As those familiar with our tastes may surmise, we at Rosenthal were not explicitly seeking out high-alcohol wine from the deep south of Italy in the recent past; nonetheless, the Attanasio family’s bold, wild Primitivo di Manduria grabbed us by the collar and all but forced us to reckon with it. Intense ripeness as a true expression of terroir is vastly different from intense ripeness as an end goal of winegrowing and winemaking, and in wines such as Attanasio’s it is simply a fact of nature—and just one part of a riveting whole.