One of my favorite summertime activities is going off the grid in remote wine places. That’s what recently led me to Tufo. And the prince.
Tufo, population 800, is the hamlet that gives its name to one of Southern Italy’s most complex and famous white wines: Greco di Tufo. Nestled in the Campania hinterlands about 40 miles northeast of Naples, Tufo and seven surrounding communes have about 2,000 acres of vineyard planted to the local subvariety of Greco Bianco.
Tufo’s dominant architectural feature is its 12th-century Norman castle, abandoned since it was damaged by a massive regional earthquake in 1980. Dilapidated and creaky, the castle waits for its prince to find a creative plan or raise the millions needed to restore it.
I’ve been drinking and writing about Greco di Tufo for many years. But I’d never heard of the prince or his Cantine di Marzo, even though it’s one of southern Italy’s oldest wineries. This was likely because, until recently, the winery was in decline.
“By 2008, the wine was really awful—it was embarrassing,” says Ferrante di Somma, the 16th prince of Colle. Up until that point in his life, he had been pursuing other interests far from Campania—in Paris, London, Moscow and Burgundy.
In 2009, he came to Tufo with the idea of reviving the family estate. In the last nine years, di Somma and enologist Vincenzo Mercurio have succeeded, producing some really interesting single-vineyard Greco di Tufo, as well as a pair of classic-method sparklers.
Still, the wines, which are poured at fine restaurants along the Campania coast, can be hard to find in the United States. Cantina di Marzo has been imported to California in small amounts. Unfortunately, efforts to expand to the East Coast have been sidelined by the current uncertainty over U.S. tariffs on European wines. Hopefully that will change.
A Brief History of Cantina di Marzo
Ferrante di Somma is the scion of two prominent families, the noble di Sommas of Naples, who earned the titles of prince and marchese during wars in the 16th century, and the landowning and entrepreneurial di Marzos (from his paternal grandmother) who have made wine in Tufo for nearly 400 years.
The first di Marzo came from Nola, outside Naples, to Tufo in 1647 to escape a plague. The di Marzos renovated the castle and moved in, excavated the cellars under it for a winery, planted vineyards and became landlords to local sharecroppers.
In 1824, the di Marzos started a farming company; later that century, they began exporting their wines and winning prizes throughout Europe. Meanwhile, in 1866, Francesco di Marzo discovered what became the main driver of Tufo’s economy: sulfur deposits that were mined through the 1980s.
The last di Marzo to live in the castle, among its 37 rooms, was a distant uncle who left after the earthquake. “He just abandoned it and let it be pillaged and re-pillaged,” di Somma says.
By the 1990s, more than 20 cousins and other relatives shared an interest in the winery and castle—making governance nearly impossible.
Ferrante di Somma’s Path Into Wine
“I always knew I was going to take over the winery,” says di Somma. “I knew it from my time as a kid, and I was disgusted to see what was going on in the winery.”
Di Somma was born in Naples but grew up in Paris. He studied economics, moved to London and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, he headed to Moscow (“the wild, wild east”), working as a partner in a neon sign company. That gig ended in 1998 when Russia defaulted on its debt during a financial crisis.
Di Somma went back to university to earn a master’s degree from the Burgundy School of Business in the international wine and spirits trade. After working several years as a wine agent specializing in the Russian market, di Somma started trying to acquire his relatives’ stakes in the Tufo properties, using money he got from the sale of a Naples apartment. He succeeded in buying out all but one cousin, took control and invested in modernizing the cellar.
Cantine di Marzo Enters Its Modern Era
Then in 2016, he reset the winery with the hiring of Mercurio, and they started with a detailed study of the vineyard soils, which are jumbles of clay, marine sediments, minerals, limestone and varied volcanic matter.
That work led to the creation of four single-vineyard Greco di Tufo riserva bottlings from vineyards on two hillsides around Tufo. The wines are identically fermented in stainless steel tanks, where they are left to mature on their lees for nine months, yet they show wildly varied expressions—from lush and powerful to bracing and elegant.
I’ll let di Somma describe the 2022 single-vineyard bottlings in his own particular way: “Vigna Ortale is the dreamer of the family. Mulino Giardino Vigna Torre Favale is the bambaccione—big baby—who still lives with his parents at 30. Vigna Serrone is the bad-boy James Dean type that’s also a bit rustic. And Vigna Laure is the straight-A student.”
Or, as I would put it in wine-speak, Ortale is a saline, pretty wine, while Mulino Giardino is more roundly tannic. Serrone displays a cutting mineral texture with a bold, but pleasant, bitterness, and Laure is lean, long and elegant.
A couple of vintages ago, di Somma began experimenting with a skin-contact Greco, called Didymos, that is fermented in amphora and aged in amphora and bottle. His Greco line also includes two vintage-dated, metodo classico sparklers: Anni Venti Extra Brut and a Brut Nature called 1930 after his father’s birth year.
In other words, Cantine di Marzo is a winery in the middle of some exciting work.
Of course, there is still a crumbling castle to deal with. “I’d like to solve that problem,” he says a bit melodramatically, “and I can die in peace.”
Travel Tip: Visiting Cantine di Marzo
Going to Naples or the Amalfi Coast? Make a side trip to Cantine di Marzo to experience the local wines. The winery is open for tours and tastings by appointment only, Monday through Saturday, starting at a cost of 20 euros per person. The typical 1.5-hour tour—which takes visitors through the winery’s medieval tunnels and caves—is available in English, French or Russian, on request, in addition to Italian. Tours conclude with a tasting of three premium wines, accompanied by local cheese and salumi. Additional wines can be added to the tasting for 5 euros each, or 7 euros for the sparkling wines.
Find out more and reserve a tour at www.cantinedimarzo.it
Azienda Agricola di Marzo
S.s. 371
83010 Tufo (AV)
Tel +39 0825 998022
Fax +39 0825 998383
info@cantinedimarzo.it
