Founded in 1932 (its roots go back to a growers’ federation of 1928), Produttori di Manduria is the oldest active wine cooperative in Puglia: ninety-four consecutive harvests from the same cellar in the centre of town. Around 300 grower families farm 700 hectares between them, an average of just over two hectares each, small enough that most of the work is still done by hand. A third of the vineyards are old bush vines, alberello, many well over fifty years old and planted so tightly that no machine fits between them. Membership passes from parent to child, and has for generations.

If there is one word for the winery, it is evolutionary. Produttori di Manduria has never preserved a single style: it has changed its wines as the times changed, while keeping the source exactly where it was. In 1997, when most Puglian wine still left the region in tankers to be bottled elsewhere, the cooperative released Lirica, a Primitivo di Manduria under its own name, and stopped selling its grapes as raw material. In 2018 it became one of the first nine Italian wineries certified under the Equalitas sustainability standard, the same year its first cases landed in the United States. In 2024 it was admitted to Italy’s Register of Historic Trademarks, a list of around a thousand brands across all Italian industry that requires fifty years of unbroken use; Antinori, Frescobaldi, Conterno and Ferrari are on it, and so is one cooperative from Puglia. And most recently, the winery that helped define classic Primitivo di Manduria made Electric Bee: picked early, unoaked, 13.5%, meant to be served chilled. Same families, same vines, different decade.

Primitivo is the heart of it all, over 60% of the vineyards. Manduria is considered the birthplace of the grape, recognized with its own DOC in 1974, and the cooperative has been the centre of the town’s economic and social life ever since. For American readers, one detail: Primitivo and Zinfandel are genetically the same vine, most likely carried to California by Italian immigrants in the 1800s. What Zinfandel became in Sonoma, Primitivo had already been in Manduria for a century. The name says it: Produttori di Manduria – Maestri in Primitivo.

Leonardo Pinto, a native of the area who previously worked for historic houses such as Candido and Leone De Castris, has been the winemaker for over twenty-five years and is widely considered the father of modern Primitivo di Manduria. His brief has never changed: let the grape speak, let Manduria show, and help the growers farm as cleanly as possible. With over 500 hectares of old Primitivo vines to work with, he crafts several expressions of the same grape, from the light, unoaked Electric Bee to the concrete-fermented Lirica, five times a Tre Bicchieri and twice in Wine Enthusiast’s Top 100, and the Riserva Elegia.

Ninety-four years of changing the wine. Not one year of changing where it comes from.