In 2004 Marco Bui gave up an advertising career in Milan so that he could go back to his native Boca to help with his parents’ fruit and vegetable business.
“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.”
Upon his return he was also put in charge of the one hectare vineyard his grandfather had acquired in 1950.
“My grandfather was a vigneron, but first of all he was a great drinker of wine,” says Marco.
One night Marco’s grandfather was drinking in the local bar when a notary who owned a particular 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.”
50 years on from his family drama, that plot would form the corner stone of Tenute Guardasole, which Marco founded in 2007, the name a nod to the nearby Cascina Guardasole farmhouse.
The family vineyard had been planted using the traditional Maggiorina system, with four vines planted together with the trunks spreading out. However, this had to be worked entirely by hand, so it was replanted in 2011 to trellised vines. The proportions are 80 per cent Nebbiolo and 20 per cent Vespolina, which complies with the Boca DOC regulations.
“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. They are historically important, but though Maggiorina vines are bucolic, I also have to pay the bills!”
Furthermore, because Maggiorina-grown grapes are not compliant with Boca DOC regulations, Marco is not interested in this traditional technique for any future plantings.
“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.”
There are two chief threats from the animal kingdom. Wild boar are increasingly numerous, and the next investment is an upgraded fencing system, part physical barrier, part electrical deterrent. Hail nets have been installed, partly for protection against hail but also as a deterrent to the wild boar and roe deer.
A dramatic and recent threat has come from the Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica, first identified in 2014. It arrived, some say, as a very unwelcome passenger at Milan’s nearby Malpensa airport, and has spread to parts of northern Italy and Switzerland. With no natural predators, it has multiplied and spread rapidly, devouring foliage, flowers and superficial roots. It can strip the leaves of whole vineyards if no measures are taken. The only solution found so far, apart from the use of unacceptable levels of insecticides, is to go out in the middle of the night to shake the beetles off the vine, collect them in their hundreds and thousands, and drown them. So much for the romance of being a grape grower.
Although organic viticulture was one of the founding tenets of Tenute Guardasole and the estate had held certification since 2016, the torrential rainfall of 2024 and a catastrophic harvest from which just two barriques of Boca produced made him reconsider and ultimately decide to relinquish organic status.
In the cellar, Boca DOC is made with Nebbiolo and Vespolina, with recent vintages seeing a reduction of the latter to 15 per cent, but Marco does not believe that the regulations should be amended to permit single-varietal Boca.
“Boca should not be 100% Nebbiolo. In Piemonte you can find lots of wines like that already. Boca is a historical denomination for a blended wine.”
Maceration times are of medium length (25–30 days) as Marco believes that all that is good is extracted in that time. The wine is aged for 30 months in 16-hectolitre untoasted Slavonian oak casks of Austrian construction.
Marco’s work is driven by a love of his land, the fields and the woods, which he remembers from his childhood. He wants a lifestyle that will allow him to walk and ski in the mountains.
“My great passion is to climb and go up. It is the reason why I can’t stay in an office in Milan,” he says. “I will be a wine producer until I don’t have the strength to do it. I don’t know if my daughter will continue with Tenute Guardasole, but my idea is to keep doing what I like – being in the vineyard and making wine. I’m a romantic, I like the story of my terroir, I like the tradition. I am nostalgic.”
Wines
Tenute Guardasole Boca
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