The product of the hottest summer on record in Puglia, the skills of Piemonte-born Antonio Ferrari, and sheer luck, the ’59 Jonica lands somewhere between a Recioto and a Port, but it’s far more complex and surprising. Notes of plums, berries and cherries dance with chocolate, earth, tobacco, black walnuts, caramel, spice and licorice in this dizzyingly layered wine. Though the Jonica has about six decades of age, it remains remarkably vibrant and nervy, hanging its myriad flavors on a sturdy tannic spine and energizing its thick palate with bright acidity. Rich, luscious, concentrated and warm, this wine needs to be tasted to be believed and sipped slowly to be appreciated. A mono-varietal Primitivo grown on old vines, this wine matured in botti for a decade and refined in concrete for an additional 35 years before being bottled.
- Country: Italy
- Region: Puglia
- Sub-region/Appellation: Primitivo di Manduria
IWM is proud to offer the fairytale wines of Antonio Ferrari, the best serious vintage wines that you’ve likely never tasted. Ferrari made these wines without meaning to sell them; they come to us--and to you--only by luck and the sheer persistence of Sergio Esposito. When Sergio tasted them by accident, he was driven to secure them, regardless of the difficulty. He did. And now these pristine, perfectly aged Puglia gems dating back to 1949 come to you with the kind of provenance that only IWM can offer.
Antonio Ferrari didn’t intend to be a winemaker, but when the Piemonte native visited Puglia in the late1920s, he fell in love with the land and its grapes. Beginning in 1938, Ferrari was making wine, choosing not to own a vineyard and instead buying the very best Primotivo, Negroamaro and Malvasia grapes from local farmers. Ferrari became entirely devoted to winemaking. He didn’t just want to make passable wine; he wanted to make amazing wine. He succeeded.
Ferrari lived a life that made him essentially eat, sleep and drink wine. For example, in 1959, the hottest summer on record in Puglia, he kept watch in the vineyards, swaddling his overheated vines in wet towels to protect the grapes that would become his legendary Solaria Jonica. A man this devoted would naturally be iconoclastic. Indeed, Ferrari died in 2003 without ever bottling all of his wines, but fortunate for us, his children took care of his legacy. The wines we’re offering date from 1978, 1959, 1954 and 1949, but they were bottled in 2004, ageing for decades in stainless steel containers.
Ferrari wines draw definite comparisons to a fine Madeira; however, while they will complement a dessert or cheese course with amazing aplomb, they’re also flexible enough to work amazingly well with meaty main courses or as aperitivi--they’d be heavenly with a holiday dinner of game or roast pork. These are wines that sit in a celestial sphere of their own: indescribable, unearthly, rare and astounding. And they’re only available at IWM.
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