Franco M. Martinetti

Pruning before the cellar

Pruning, thinning, harvest timing, fermentation, barrel aging and bottling stay under the eye of Franco Maria Martinetti, winemaker at Franco M. Martinetti in Centro, Turin. The order matters. At this house, the work is described from the vine forward, with grape variety chosen according to terroir, exposure and vine age before the cellar has its say. Martinetti began producing wine in 1974, after an earlier life in advertising, and the shift reads less like a departure than a narrowing of attention. The table, the bottle and the culture around fine dining gave him a route into Piedmont wine, then the bench became the longer discipline.

His own language puts value and craft in the same sentence: “We live to produce fine wines that enrich the taste and soul.” The line is not decorative here. It sits beside a working practice in which the maker keeps close to decisions that many houses distribute across a wider chain of hands. Since 2003, Martinetti has also served as president of the Académie Internationale du Vin, while producer has remained from 1974 to the present under the same name on the bottle.

Barbera given a deeper register

The program is Piedmontese in its bones, led by Nebbiolo and Barbera, with still red wine as the central language. Barolo and Barbera d’Asti carry the house’s reputation, and Marasco gives that reputation a precise address: Serralunga d’Alba, named by the winery as the vineyard location for the Barolo. The house also lists Sul Bric, Montruc, Bric dei Banditi, Georgette and Lauren among its reds, with Biancofranco, Minaia, Gavi, Martin, Quarantatrè and Quarantatrè Rosè extending the range beyond one flagship bottle.

Martinetti’s Barbera work has been described in terms of correction: taking a grape too easily filed as fresh and fruity, then building wines with more depth and elegance. The method published around him is not a recipe of temperatures or vessel sizes. It is a sequence of judgments, pruning before thinning, thinning before harvest timing, grape selection before fermentation, fermentation before barrel aging and bottling. No single stage carries the whole wine. The discipline is cumulative.

A Turin address for Piedmont wine

The setting is not the expected rural estate framed by rows of vines. Franco M. Martinetti works from a historic city building in central Turin, an urban house for a Piedmont producer whose wines still speak through vineyard names, grape decisions and cellar patience. That placement gives the work a particular texture: quieter, more interior, closer to the city’s gastronomy and trade than to a pastoral tasting-room image.

In the room, the tone is classic rather than industrial. The scale is small, and the emphasis falls on vinification, selection and care rather than volume. Private tasting belongs naturally to that register, but the stronger image is of a producer who has kept the cellar close to his own hands. The next release is not announced here as spectacle. It arrives through the same vocabulary of labels, with Marasco carrying the house forward.