Felline

A founder still working the Manduria line

The decision to keep Primitivo close to its soils guides Gregory Perrucci , winemaker at Felline in Manduria. He founded the winery in 1992, then founded Accademia Dei Racemi in 1999, placing Felline inside a longer program of Puglian recovery rather than a single-house story. His role now carries that early conviction forward: Primitivo di Manduria as a serious local wine, native grapes as a living field of work, and Manduria not as backdrop but as method. Perrucci is a third-generation figure rooted in the area’s wine family tradition, and Felline’s identity has always leaned toward continuity with pressure on it. The house works in the countryside outside Manduria, about 10 km from the Gulf of Taranto, where dry heat and sun give Primitivo the ripeness it can carry when the farming and cellar hold their nerve. The wider Accademia dei Racemi project gives that work another register. It has been tied to the revival and valorizing of indigenous Puglian varieties, with Felline named as one of the protagonists of Primitivo di Manduria’s rise.

Parcels kept separate before the blend

Felline farms around 120 hectares of vineyard across selected plots, with sand, loam, tuff, and clay over limestone rock shaping different readings of the same territory. The house vinifies grapes from different soil types separately, a practical cellar decision that lets texture, acidity, and fruit weight declare themselves before blending. Around 80 hectares have been cultivated organically for 20 years, and Giravolta vineyard and Giravolta Primitivo di Manduria are certified organic. That figure gives the sustainability language weight because it sits in the farming, not in the copy. For Felline Primitivo di Manduria, the grapes are harvested at the start of September, fermented, then matured for around six months in French barriques. The wine is 100% Primitivo; the 2022 listing gives 14% alcohol, while Dunico Primitivo di Manduria, placed at the top of the portfolio, is also 100% Primitivo and carries 16% in the 2018 listing. Felline I Monili Primitivo moves differently, unoaked and built for a brighter reading of the grape. Alongside Primitivo, the program reaches into Negroamaro, Ottavianello, Malvasia Nera, and Susumaniello, the varieties that make the Accademia work more than a preservation label.

The cellar beside the fields

The place keeps the feeling of a working winery rather than a designed stage. Tastings sit close to the vineyard work and the cellar logic: Primitivo first, then the native varieties that widen the map of Puglia. The room is straightforward, conversational, and oriented toward education, with the countryside pressing in around it. Agricultural land, vineyard rows, and the road out of Manduria do more to set the tone than ornament would. That suits Felline. The wines ask to be understood through soil, ripening, separation, and time in wood, not through ceremony. In Perrucci’s own line about earlier work, “Oh, it was a long time ago, now we are pursuing completely different ideas!” The sentence leaves room for change without cutting the root. Giravolta Primitivo di Manduria is the bottle that holds the farming most plainly.