Tormaresca

Every so often a great wine family looks up from its home region and asks where the next frontier is. When Tuscany's Antinori — the house behind Tignanello, twenty-six generations deep — went looking, the answer wasn't another hill in Chianti or a plot in Bordeaux. It was the sunburnt heel of Italy.

Tormaresca is that bet, planted in Puglia from the late 1990s: a wager that the south held terroir the world had never taken seriously, and that the family who helped invent the Super Tuscan could do the same trick again a few hundred kilometres down the boot. What makes it clever is that they didn't buy one estate and one grape. They bought two very different corners of Puglia — and let each make the wine it was born to.

Two estates, two souths

The first is Bocca di Lupo, inland in Castel del Monte, up on the cool, windswept Murge plateau under Frederick II's great octagonal castle. Altitude and cold nights here build a different kind of Puglian red — structured, savoury, ageworthy, closer in spirit to the serious reds of the centre than to the plush wines of the coast. This is Puglia with a spine.

The second is Masseria Maìme, down in Salento, the hot flat heel, where the estate farms old-vine Negroamaro — the grape whose name means "black and bitter" and whose best expressions are anything but crude. Warm, dark, savoury, faintly bitter in the good way, it's the truest read on what southern Puglia actually tastes like.

One estate for altitude and structure, one for heat and old bush vines. Between them, Tormaresca covers the two faces of Puglian red in a single portfolio.

The wines

The range runs from easy, sunny everyday bottles up to the two single-estate statements — and it's the statements that tell you why the family came south.

Start with Bocca di Lupo if you want the ambitious face of the estate: the Castel del Monte flagship, built on the plateau's structured reds, dark-fruited and spiced with real grip and length. This is the wine that argues Puglia can make something to cellar, not just something to pour. Confirm the exact grape identity on the vintage in front of you — the Murge's reds are worth understanding before you buy.

Then Masseria Maìme, the old-vine Negroamaro from Salento — the purest single expression of Puglia's signature grape in the range, and the bottle I'd reach for to teach someone what Negroamaro is. Where Bocca di Lupo is about structure, Maìme is about place: heat, sea air, old vines, the savoury-bitter twist that makes the grape unmistakable.

Below them sits a broad, reliable range of Puglian everyday wines — Primitivo, Chardonnay, rosato, the sunny stuff done properly at scale. Good value, honest, and a fair introduction to the house before you climb to the top bottles.

The setting

The contrast is the whole story. Up at Castel del Monte, you're on a high limestone plateau, the medieval castle on the skyline, the nights genuinely cold even in a Puglian summer — a landscape that reads more like the interior than the coast. Down in Salento, it's the postcard south: flat red earth, old alberello bush vines, olive groves and the two seas never far off. Two estates, and you can feel the difference in the glass.

Visiting

Good news, and a caveat. Because this is a modern, professionally-run estate rather than a private boutique cellar, access here is more open than at Puglia's cult names — the sort of place built to receive visitors properly. The Castel del Monte estate, near its namesake castle, is the more rewarding call: combine the tasting with the monument and you've got a full day. That said, confirm current arrangements and seasons before you travel, and book ahead rather than assuming a walk-in.

Make it a hub. Northern Puglia pairs the wine with Frederick II's architecture and the trulli country not far off; base in the region and you can see both Tormaresca faces without a punishing drive.

What to buy

Match the bottle to the question you're asking. If it's "can Puglia make a serious, structured red to lay down?" — reach for Bocca di Lupo and give it time. If it's "what does Puglia actually taste like?" — that's Masseria Maìme, the old-vine Negroamaro, every time. And if you just want a sunny, well-made southern red for a Tuesday, the estate's everyday range is the easy, affordable yes that shows the family knows how to work at scale too.