Marco Bui left a career in the big city to go back to Boca to work as a market trader with his parents. In this interview he shares how this set him on the path to founding Tenute Guardasole.
“While I was working in advertising in Milan I would also travel to other big cities across Europe and North America, and whenever I looked out of the plane window as I flew over the Alps and saw the Monte Rosa I realised that this wasn’t the life for me.”
Having clambered up the rungs from communications graduate to the rank of ‘account director’, stepping off the corporate ladder was a bold move, but Marco has no regrets about the decision he made in 2004 to give up the glamour and salary that come with being a high-flying adman in Italy’s financial capital so that he could return to his native Boca.
“I think if I had stayed in advertising I could have become a general manager, but I looked at those ahead of me. No-one had a family, everyone was seeing a psychiatrist. That wasn’t what I was after. I wanted freedom. Freedom outside of commuting and being in the office. I was born and grew up here in Boca with the forests and the mountains.”
Throughout his time in advertising Marco would still return home at the weekends to help his parents with their fresh fruit and vegetable business, something he and his sister had been involved in from a very young age.
“I started working with my parents selling fruit and vegetables during the summer holiday when I was six. My most important school was the experience of selling fruit and vegetables in the street market. I met so many different kinds of people,” he says.
When he left Milan he began to work alongside his parents full-time, swapping late nights in the office for early starts, the world of marketing for that of street markets.
Grapes of wrath
Not content with the back-breaking work of shifting pallets of produce from A to B and back again each day, Marco started to make wine for his family when he returned, using fruit from a vineyard his maternal grandfather had bought in 1950. The story of the acquisition of this south-facing hectare of vines was a real-life soap opera, and one that looms large in his family history.
Marco’s grandad was a wine grower who did not have his own vineyard but certainly enjoyed partaking in the fruits of his labour, or, as Marco puts it: “My grandfather was a vigneron, but first of all he was a great drinker of wine.”
One night he was drinking in the local bar when a notary who owned a particularly enticing parcel of vines walked in.
“My grandfather and the notary both got very drunk and signed a contract for the sale of the vineyard. My grandad went home, took all the money that my grandmother had been saving to buy a house and paid the notary there and then.”
Marco’s grandmother was, understandably, furious and died just two years later. In a twist to the tale, it was this tragedy which meant that the vineyard survived while so many in Boca were abandoned as farmers left their vines in favour of more lucrative jobs in the booming textiles industry.
“Vineyards completely disappeared, apart from ours because my mother made sure it was preserved,” he explains. “My mother wanted to keep the vineyard going out of respect to her mother. It was the thing which completely changed her life.”
How to get ahead in winemaking
“I discovered that this was the work I really liked.”
In 2007 he made the leap and started work on his own winery, making use of fruit from the family vineyard and lessons learned from his work in Milan.
“I wanted to use my knowledge from working with big brands on myself. I wanted a little business that worked in the best way.”
As a marketing man he knew the importance of a good name. ‘Guardasole’ came from a nearby farmhouse, Cascina Guardasole, and was also chosen as a nod to a former client of his, organic yoghurt producer Fattoria Scaldasole.
“My creative director would say that things which work are often not new, but reimagined old things. I started as organic, like Fattoria Scaldasole”.
“I also realised that ‘Guardasole’ was easy for non-Italians to remember,” he quips.
While developing the brand, tending the vines and working in the cellar, Marco was still working in the family business.
“In order to pay for the winery it was necessary for me to keep working selling fruit and vegetables,” he explains, noting that he only stopped doing both jobs in 2019. “I don’t know how I did it.”
Indeed, the rhythms of his winemaking had to adapt to those of a market trader, rising early so that he could pump over his fermentations before setting off for the day’s trading.
While grateful for these formative decades, and finding working with fruit and vegetables preferable to the rat race in Milan, there is a sense of relief from Marco that he can now solely focus on looking after his grapes instead of selling onions and oranges.
“If I take a look back, I can see that working with my parents was a huge opportunity. For me, work is easier now because I used to have to work incredibly hard, waking up at 3 a.m. and finishing in the evening,” he shares. “When I started Tenute Guardasole I was not deeply-involved in the wine world. It was my second job. It was not my plan to be a fine wine producer. My idea was just to make something to sell so that I could go on holiday with my family!”
However, “easier” work does not mean “easy” work. In the next part of the story we will look at the changes Marco has made to Tenute Guardasole over the last two decades, from switching vine-training systems to abandoning organic.