Produttori di Manduria
The Estate
Produttori di Manduria is the oldest active wine cooperative in Puglia: it was first established in 1928 as “Federazione Vini di Manduria” and then converted in to a cooperative in 1932 as “Consorzio Vini e Mosti di Manduria”. The cooperative is comprised of 400 small growers farming 900 hectares of vineyards: with an average 2.25 hectares per member, each grower is able to carry out most of the vineyard management by hand with an extreme attention to quality. Primitivo is the major focus of the winery, both in terms of vineyards planted (over 60% of the total) and in terms of tradition: Manduria is considered the birth place of the native Primitivo grape, so much so that in 1974 the Italian Government recognized a specific DOC appellation to the Primitivo made in Manduria. Thanks to this intimate, almost symbiotic, relationship between Manduria and the Primitivo wine production, the Winery has always played a vital role in the local economy, becoming the center of Manduria’s economic, social and cultural life.
The Winery’s Management has always been extremely stable, with only 5 Presidents in the last 76 years (Italy has changed a few dozen Governments in the same period!). Furthermore, the Growers are locally known as the “Masters of Primitivo”, and the membership of the Coop has been proudly handed down from Father to Son for generations.
The Wine
The Manduria Producers Winery today has 1000 hectares of vineyards, half of which are cultivated in Primitivo vineyards and the remaining parts are Negroamaro, Merlot, Cabernet and Malvasia, of which the majority is still grown with the traditional sapling system, and counts on a large number of small wine artisans, around 400, proud to be part of the Cooperative and the only ones who can boast the nickname of Masters in Primitivo.
The Cooperative and its members adopt integrated pest control, a crop protection practice which involves a drastic reduction in the use of pesticides by implementing various measures aimed at continuously respecting the soil and its vines, trying to obtain a wine with always better organoleptic qualities.