For nearly sixty years no wine was made at Conestabile della Staffa. Then Danilo Marcucci, a veteran of more than two decades alongside Italy's natural-wine masters, brought his wife's ancestral Umbrian estate back to life.
Backstory
The estate belongs to the lineage of Alessandra Marcucci, Danilo's wife, descended from two old Umbrian families, the Conestabile of Orvieto and the Della Staffa of Perugia, joined by an arranged marriage in the 1700s. The last vintage from the original cantina was 1956; for decades afterward the grapes were sold to the local co-op. Danilo took over production in 2015 and describes himself simply as a guest, married into the vines.
The Region
The property sits in the village of Monte Melino in Umbria, near Perugia and Lake Trasimeno, in the green heart of central Italy.
Vineyards and Farming
About 12 hectares of vines, planted in the early 1970s, were converted to biodynamic and low-intervention farming from 2016. The land has never been touched by chemical pesticides. The plantings are a wide patchwork of Grechetto, Trebbiano, Malvasia, Pinot Grigio, Sangiovese, Ciliegiolo, Canaiolo, Gamay del Trasimeno, Sagrantino, Aleatico, and Merlot.
Winemaking
Danilo sums up his approach as "no technology": no added yeast, no chemical corrections, and no sulfur. Fermentations are spontaneous, and the wines are generally neither fined nor filtered. He works in fiberglass tanks, very old barrels, some more than a century old, and a single large 1,400-liter oak cask.
The Wines
The estate makes a wide range of whites, roses, and reds, including the Bianco Conestabile and the Monaco bottlings, all expressing the noble Umbrian terroir in its purest form.
