Cantele

These wines are a piece of history. It starts out in the early 20th century, against the backdrop of a still sepia-toned Italy. It’s the story of a man named Giovanni Battista Cantele and his family’s winery. He’s the first character in this tale, which begins in the city of Imola during the First World War. Giovanni Battista Cantele had left the city where he was born, Pramaggione, as he followed the woman who would one day become his wife and the mother of his children Augusto and Domenico. She would later become the inspiration for a wine that now bears her name: Teresa Manara.

Many years later, Augusto Cantele would start our family’s winery Cantine Cantele, together with his father and his brother Domenico in 1979. But first he went to study winemaking in the north in Conegliano and he stayed on in the north to work at wineries in Veneto where he discovered his passion for white wines. In the 1970s, as Italy was once again going through radical changes, Augusto returned to his family in Lecce and began working as a consultant in the villages of Guagnano and Salice Salentino. It wouldn’t be until the 1990s, when he bought his first vineyards, that he would produce the first bottles with the Cantele family name.

Territory:

Situated in the heart of the Mediterranean, Puglia is a land of rare beauty, where vast plains alternate with gentle hills. Salento, the long narrow strip that forms Puglia’s southern peninsula, extends between the Ionian and Adriatic seas. It’s an area rich with ancient olive groves and vines, enchanting beaches and jagged rocky shoreline, classic grottos and some of Italy’s best farmland.