Vito Manduano
Founder
I certainly inherited the passion for wine from my paternal grandfather.
He used to make wine from local vineyards owned by some of his family members devoted to agriculture and the harvest thus became an opportunity to bring the whole family together.
I remember the perfume of the must characterised by intense colours, which after fermentation turned into wine, I remember the joy of those days spent pouring the wine into demijohns, an opportunity for my beloved grandmother to prepare an adorable hot focaccia to delight the palates of us, grandchildren and children.
I inherited the interest in agriculture from my mother … her father was the owner of a large farm, areas of which were planted exclusively with vines and who, having reached retirement age, decided to assign the different vineyards to each of his children. My mother inherited a vineyard of black grapes in a particular moment in our lives, mine and my sister’s. I was just 13 years old at the time and like any other teenager at that age I certainly wasn’t able to manage that land, much less my mother and for this reason I reluctantly convinced her to sell that plot. At the same time, I promised myself that one day with that money I would buy other land even with larger extensions and so it was!
Today we are the owners of a farm of about 35 hectares.
Our first wine, Ottantadì, was born from the promise I made 20 years ago, combined with that made by our oenologist and friend, Giuseppe Colopi.
Ottantadì: “a wine, a promise”, indeed two!
Michela Manduano
Administrator
Time is in a hurry; you must take it otherwise it goes away. To our wine, on the contrary, we dedicate all the time it takes to get far, over the years and in the aims.
The first thought that comes to me when I think of my family are the morals that have been transmitted to me. I owe everything to my grandparents, they taught me respect for others and I have many memories of them … they were very close to each other, no one ever did anything without the other. My grandparents’ house was always full of people, because was genuineness and purity of soul there. I can say with extreme certainty, that if my brother and I are what we are today, it is thanks to their teachings. They have given us values that are now difficult to be found in people. The memories linked to them, in this moment of our life, come back more than ever.
We are approaching the world of wine, something definitely different from our jobs, but it is thanks to our grandparents that our passion started.
At the grandparents’ home there was never a lack of good wine, neither on the table, nor on the shelves as a reserve, along with milk and flour: it was considered as important as a basic necessity. My grandfather dedicated all of himself to that wine, until the end, when he was very old, making it in secret, away from the eyes of children and grandchildren who feared that he would get too tired.
I can’t forget that smell of wine… Today when I taste wine, I always have the same memory of me as a child, who watched in amazement the processes to made that magic.
My grandpa would be proud of our new experience turned on by a true passion, the same one that he conveyed to my brother Vito and me in dealing with life: “A life without passion, it would be a flat life”.
I remember that my grandfather, in return for kind things, proudly donated his wine, the fruit of passion and dedication.
Today, as he taught me, I express the same pride in presenting our Ottantadì.
Giuseppe Colopi
Co-Founder & Winemaker
I consider myself a very lucky person, as I have a profession that I love, passion is the driving force of my knowledge.
Continuous training is important, also because there is still so much to discover in the world of wine.
After about 25 years in the profession, after having worked on international grape varieties and studied the evolution of wine, I started to get passionate and interested in native vines of my home land, Puglia.
I understood from my experience that certain wines can only be made by a native, as a connoisseur of that common language.
You need to have great knowledge of local climate and culture, maintain an exchange of views with farmers, sometimes even speaking one’s beloved dialect, know the terroir deeply, and finally cultivate a deep love for one’s land and memories and the unforgettable scents of one’s childhood.
Uva di Troia is the native grape variety that I prefer. We are not yet able to understand how it came to us, it was certainly brought by the Greeks during the colonisation of our land, in the time when it was called Magna Grecia. Its origin is only a hypothesis and what I most would have liked to be true is the myth of Diomedes, a great Greek warrior and hero, who after the Trojan War, it is said to have sailed to the Adriatic Sea and had brought with him, as a keepsake, some vine shoots that planted on the banks of the Ofanto River, gave rise to the Uva di Troia variety.
Today through Ottantadì we continue to tell the history, our history.
