Giovanni Nardelli

Giovanni Nardelli is president of Cantine Risveglio in Brindisi, Italy, where his work as an agronomist gives the cooperative’s story a distinctly viticulture-led character. Founded in 1958 by a group of winegrowers in the city, the winery carries the imprint of a collective enterprise rooted in the land, and Nardelli’s perspective has long been shaped by the field as much as the cellar. That balance — between vine, grower, and finished wine — is central to his approach, lending his leadership a practical precision and a close attention to the rhythms of cultivation. Nardelli’s connection to Cantine Risveglio is not a recent chapter, but one that has unfolded over time. He served as president from 1996 to 2006, a period that marked an important phase in the cooperative’s evolution. In the years that followed, he continued to guide the winery’s trajectory toward modernization and a stronger focus on bottled wine, reflecting an understanding that progress in a cooperative setting depends not only on scale, but also on clarity of identity. Under that lens, the winery’s work is less about abstraction than about translating the character of the vineyards into wines that can stand confidently on their own. His background in agronomy and viticulture remains the through line. It is a discipline that asks for patience, observation, and respect for what the vineyard offers in each season, and it suits a producer whose reputation rests on being deeply engaged with the source of the wine. In Brindisi, that means seeing the winery not as an endpoint, but as an expression of a wider agricultural landscape — one in which growers, grapes, and the cooperative model remain tightly intertwined.