A small jewel of a project from the criminally underrated region of Le Marche, Verdicchio has long been overlooked as one of Italy’s greatest white varieties and in the right place, in the right hands, this grape is a pure terroir translator with enormous character. The ‘Insieme’ Verdicchio Classico Superiore from Terralibera is one such wine that makes you sit up and take a further look at this region, beautiful rolling hills that were formerly under the Adriatic sea and as such are alive with marine fossils and calcareous clay and sand.

Gian Mario Bongini comes from a family of Milanese farmers, a far cry from the verdant hills of Le Marche but nevertheless, his ancestry is on the land. After an economics degree and a career in corporate finance, Gian Mario made a hard turn and decided to relocate to the area where he spent his summers for many years, in an effort to grow the wines he’d come to love. Le Marche offered a pastoral, antiquated lifestyle and the wine industry there is very much rooted in its ancient traditions, pre-chemical farming and pre-industrial winemaking. This appealed to Gian Mario who was a firm believer in organic farming and wanted to try and take on a piece of land on his own to make classic Castelli di Jesi from a single site that he could farm himself. In 2013 he relocated and began to make some wines in the cellars of friends, and then in 2021 he found his vineyards in Serre de’ Conti, 7 hectares on two adjacent hills with 3 different aspect slopes. The vineyard is at 250-300m elevation, one of the highest hills in the area that benefits from a constant cool sea breeze, the Adriatic being only 20km away.

In 2021 Gian Mario employed enologist/agronomist, Claudio Caldaroni to help him execute his vision, and together they work to intervene as little as possible with the environment, the grapes, the must and the wine. Since purchasing the vineyards (planted to a traditional system of double arched guyot), Gian Mario shifted to organic farming and uses copper and sulfur as little as possible. He employs certain techniques of biodynamics, like spraying infusions and concoctions of seaweed, nettle and horsetail to regulate the vineyards’ microbiology. Similarly, the soils are enriched through green manure made with legumes and grains and are lefty grassy, to be mowed only once or twice per year. There is absolutely no plastic used in the vineyards, so even the vines are tied with biodegradable materials.

The grapes are harvested by hand and carried to the winery where they are immediately de-stemmed and gently pressed to obtain the free-run must. A few hours later, the cold-pressed must is clarified through decanting, adding time and complexity to the fermentation process but eliminating room for error and the use of sulfites until bottling. Fermentation takes place spontaneously with indigenous yeasts at 18’C in stainless steel tanks, followed by a few months of refining on the lees with periodical batonnage until February when tartaric stabilization takes place by bringing the temperature of the cooling tank to -4’. After racking, the tanks are cleaned and the wine is transferred with the additional of a minimal amount of sulfites to guarantee stability. In March or April, the wine is bottled and left to age for another 2-3 months.