Chardonnay

When people first become familiar with the wines of the Cantele family, they are often surprised to discover that the winery produces Chardonnay.

Primitivo? Of course! The great red workhorse of Pugliese wine.

Negroamaro? It goes without saying! Negroamaro is the quintessential red grape of the Salento peninsula and it produces one of the greatest wines of Italy.

Historically, Puglia has been known for its production of red grapes. And there was a time (and not so long ago that people don’t remember) when red wine was shipped from Puglia up to Northern Italy and even as far away as France. It was often blended into red wines that needed higher alcohol levels or more color.

Indeed, Puglia was a powerhouse in commercial wine production throughout the modern era.

If you drank a red wine in a Paris restaurant at the height of the phylloxera crisis during the mid-nineteenth century, it’s not unlikely that you drank a wine grown in Puglia.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s when Augusto Cantele began experimenting with new approaches to grape harvest that Chardonnay became a commercially viable grape variety in Puglia and he is widely recognized as the Chardonnay pioneer of the Salento peninsula.

He believed — and his vision for white wine in Puglia has become a reality — that the limestone subsoils of Puglia’s Salento Peninsula were ideal for the cultivation of Chardonnay.

Indeed, the entire Salento peninsula lies on limestone.

That same limestone is what gives the city of Lecce it’s golden baroque architecture.

It’s also what has made Puglia one of the world’s greatest olive oil producers since antiquity.

Augusto Cantele changed the course of Puglia viticulture when he first began to grow and vinify Chardonnay in Salento in the early 1990s.

After years spent studying winemaking and working in wineries in northern Italy, where Italy’s white production was focused at the time, not only had he nurtured a taste for fresh, fruit-driven whites, but he also had developed his immense skill and experience in growing practices and vinification techniques used in the production of top white wines.

Even before he returned to Puglia to join his family’s winery, he had long dreamed of making Chardonnay in his family’s adoptive homeland — Puglia’s Salento peninsula. When the estate began releasing its first white wines, he became a pioneer of Chardonnay production in the region.

Today, the winery’s bottlings of Chardonnay — from its youthful Chardonnay to the French barrique-aged Teresa Manara — are considered benchmarks for the category.

This year marks the twentieth vintage of Cantele Teresa Manara Chardonnay, named after the Cantele family’s grandmother, the woman whose love of Salento inspired her husband to relocate to Puglia.

Rhythms that repeat themselves, over and over, just like the sunrise.

Between ancient olive trees and expert hands, traditions intertwine every evening surrounded by two seas but just one sunset.

Under a hot sun, men and women sing among the vines. Their hands are rough and their movements soft.

Run, Teresa. The earth is warm under your feet. You taught us how color tells us when the moment is right. Run. The fruit is ripe and harvest won’t wait.

Twenty summers, twenty harvests. Winds that blow from the north and dry the dew. A new vintage is ready. It’s ready and it whispers your name.