After he started Tenute Guardasole from his family vineyard, Marco Bui was forced to make some big calls when it came to balancing sentimentality with practicality.
Tenute Guardasole’s story began with the hectare of vines that had been in the family since 1950 – the story of its acquisition covered in part one of this series. When Marco made the leap from making wine as a hobby to doing so commercially, it became necessary to re-evaluate the vineyard he had inherited, particularly regarding how the vines were trained.
The ‘alla Maggiorina’ method involves three or four vines, often of different varieties, being planted in close proximity to one another. As they grow they are splayed out, with a wooden frame for support, so that the structure resembles an upturned umbrella. Very much a traditional viticultural technique from the area around the town of Maggiora, from which it takes its name, Maggiorina vines have their advantages and disadvantages. For Marco, the drawbacks were more decisive.
In 2011 he decided to replant the family vineyard in ‘filari’, rows of trellised vines, 80% of which are Nebbiolo and the remainder Vespolina.
“I replanted so that we could use tractors,” explains Marco. “Before that everything had to be done by hand, but that was very hard for me to do on my own, especially when I was still working in my parents’ fruit and vegetable business.”
Asked if he would consider Maggiorina-trained vines for any future plantings, his answer is an unequivocal “no”.
“They are historically important, but though Maggiorina vines are bucolic, I also have to pay the bills! They’re hard work and you can’t make Boca DOC wines with fruit grown ‘alla Maggiorina’ because the yields are too high, it is very productive because there are longer branches than guyot vines,” he says. “Also, because Maggiorina is usually a mixture of varieties, if you have an old vineyard planted that way you probably have Croatina in there.”
For Marco, having ‘Boca’ on the label of his flagship wine is vital to the identity of Tenute Guardasole.
“I’m not a wine producer, I’m a Boca producer. I don’t want to make white wine. I don’t want to make rosato. Nor sparkling. My hope for the future is to have two different labels of Boca, my current one and maybe a Riserva.”
Varietal piety
At the moment Tenute Guardasole makes one Boca and produces two Vino Rosso-designated wines, Virgilio and Pio Decimo, the latter named after a local Cardinal who went on to become Pope Pius X.
Because the Boca DOC requires between 70% and 90% Nebbiolo in the blend (the remainder filled by Vespolina and/or Uva Rara), the single-varietal Nebbiolo Pio Decimo cannot be labelled as ‘Boca’. For Marco, this posed a conundrum about how to label it.
“I don’t want to call it ‘Colline Novaresi Nebbiolo’ because Colline Novaresi is a cheap denomination, so I prefer to call it ‘Vino Rosso’ and explain the difference to my customers. My Pio Decimo spends 18 months in wood, with Colline Novaresi you can go on the market after four months in steel.”
One of the reasons Marco makes a single-varietal Nebbiolo is that he considers vinifying this grape to be fairly straightforward.
“You just have to take the grapes, press them, and give them enough time to ferment. Nothing is mandatory, no added chemicals are necessary. Vespolina is not the same. Vespolina’s fermentation differs year-by-year. With Nebbiolo you pump over three times a day and after 15 days the wine is ready.”
“However,” he hastens to add, “you need to get perfect grapes in the cellar.”
Exiting organic
Achieving quality in the vineyard is challenging for any producer, even more so when they are trying to do so without the use of artificial treatments.
Although organic viticulture was one of the founding tenets of Tenute Guardasole, in 2024 Marco made the decision to relinquish the organic-certified status his winery had held since 2016. Part of this decision was because Marco, a former adman, suspected that the marketing value of organic wasn’t translating into sales.
“It only presents obstacles,” he says. “When I started organic viticulture, in my mind I thought people in the future would recognise the added value of organic products, but after 15 years I saw that nobody was interested. Often I would see my wines in restaurants and wine shops and see no reference to my wine being organic. I worked hard and certification cost a lot every year, but people weren’t interested.”
The straw which broke the camel’s back was the 2024 harvest, the “worst” Marco has ever seen. An inundation of 1,380mm of rainfall from April until the harvest was double the typical level across an entire year. The result was a catastrophic outbreak of downy mildew.
“It wasn’t hard work, it was impossible. We sprayed with copper every two days, and with the tractor on the wet ground we destroyed the soil. All to obtain almost nothing.”
Tenute Guardasole produced just two barriques of Boca 2024. The only vines to bear fruit was a single row bordering a neighbouring vineyard which was sprayed with artificial fungicides.
“This was the empirical evidence for me that in bad vintages, organic just doesn’t work.”
Green shoots
Although the climatic conditions of a bad vintage cannot be remedied, making up the shortfall in production can help business in a lean year, and that requires more grapes.
Marco drives us about 15 minutes from his grandfather’s vineyard. We aren’t travelling for long before we are off tarmac and crunching along an untamed track that snakes through a forest. Suspension and tyres still intact, we get out of the car. He peels back a wire fence designed to keep deer and hares out as we step into the one hectare enclosure.
Wildlife has to be kept at bay because inside are 3,000 young vines, planted by Marco and a friend over the course of three arduous days. The land had to be cleared beforehand, the sale of the felled trees an added bonus.
“It was the first time in my life that I made money from selling wood,” he chuckles.
This was a vineyard until it was abandoned at the outbreak of the First World War. Over the course of the 20th century it was, like so many of the vineyards of Boca, consumed by the forest. Marco chose to bring it back.
“I realised I needed another hectare. Every year in September I would run out of wine and I knew I needed more to cover the year. I could have bought grapes, but I wanted to plant a new vineyard,” he continues. “I was looking for one that was similar to my old vineyard. South exposition, same elevation of around 460 metres, the wind blowing through. I discovered three or four places that I liked and I chose the best. It took a lot of time to complete the deal, around five years, because a lot of people were involved in the sale. It’s close to the church, which is the symbol of Boca, so it is in the heart of the appellation.”
Planted with 85% Nebbiolo and 15% Vespolina, this new vineyard may start producing grapes in 2028, the fruit to be used for Tenute Guardasole’s Boca label. The fence will be electrified once grapes emerge in an effort to stop wild boar from eating the harvest, but Marco accepts that trying to co-exist with creatures of the forest is part of what it means to be a winemaker in this corner of Alto Piemonte.
“Boca is a forest with vineyards. Even in the past when we had more vineyards, the forest was always present.”
In the final part of this trilogy of articles on Tenute Guardasole we will discover how the old certainties of viticulture have been wiped away by climate change and find out why Marco is adamant that Boca needs to add a ‘Garantita’ to its DOC.