Authentic, artisanal wines, no matter where they come from and what they cost, should be evocative.  They should trigger something emotional inside the drinker, a memory of a place, or a smell, or a person.  When we opened a bottle of Colleleva’s 2024 Rosso Piceno this morning at our tasting bar, I was instantly transported to a Sunday lunch with close friends in a dive-y roadhouse somewhere in the hills of Le Marche.  The dining room was packed with families, truckers and farmers sitting at long communal tables.  No one spoke English and there was no menu.  The only questions the harried servers asked were ‘do you want a secondo after the primo?,’ and ‘rosso o bianco?’  Our answer was, of course, ‘Si,’ and ‘Can’t we have both?’  The food was terrific. The house-made pastas were served on large platters, family-style, while the secondo di giorno turned out to be grilled flatiron steaks, roasted potatoes and broccoli rabe. Along with a bottle of eminently slurp-able white Verdicchio, the Vino Rosso that was plonked down on the table came right out of the icebox; the perfect wine for that warm Sunday afternoon and memorable for all the right reasons. While I have no idea what was actually in that bottle of Le Marche Rosso (there was, alas, no label), I suspect it’s a lot like Colleleva’s savory and delicious Rosso Piceno, made from the dark, rustic and very local Montepucliano grape, augmented by a bit of Sangiovese. I will say that, qualitatively, there is no comparison.  Colleleva’s is so much better by any empirical measure.  But that’s sort of beside the point.  The allure of this wine is in its pure, nicely delineated fruit, its great natural acidity and that perfect dash of rusticity that would give it street cred in any roadhouse anywhere.  It will never stand out in a blind tasting or get 94 points from a wine writer, but put it alongside a bowl of fried olives from Ascoli, a Vincisgrassi (a sort of Lasagna found in the Le Marche hills) or even your own version of a grilled flatiron steak and, well, that’s the stuff from which you can make your own memories.  Drink now with a little chill or serve it cellar temperature.  But, please, just serve it!