The Marche, tucked behind the knee of the Italian boot, is enviably graced with a sweep of Adriatic coastline and a sheltering ridge of inland peaks. East-west river valleys channel cool sea air over plains and up into rolling Apennine foothills. Altitude, exposition and soil type angle and shift as you move inland, giving rise to an impressive array of climatic subzones. A paramount Italian white variety and two of the country’s best-known red grapes are firmly at home here. Yet the wines are still little known outside the region and are ripe for discovery now.

Deep in geologic time, the Marche was seafloor. When the Adriatic retreated to its present contours, it left a rich bed of chalk and limestone soils. Fast forward to the early modern period, when the Marche was first an outlier (the name Marche derives from a Germanic word for border area), then a peripheral Papal state, valued mostly for its abundant agrarian output. Pilgrims crossed the territory en route to an important Catholic shrine at Loreto, slaking their thirst on Marche wines. In the 1860s, when the Vatican was forced to sell off its Marche holdings as part of Italian unification, fields of sunflowers and wheat, groves of olive trees and, above all, countless vineyards entered new hands.