Vinitaly International Importer Connect

About Us

Great professionalism goes into the product with the main aim being innovation and excellence. What counts is not where we come from but what we are and how we do what we do. So with this idea in their heads, in 1992 the two young entrepreneurs, Francesco Marra and Francesco Winspeare, established the Castel di Salve wine growing and producing business. Within the family property there are more than 40 hectares of vines and another guiding principle of the company it that the wine is produced exclusively with their own grapes.

There are local varieties of vines, with excellent qualities, which have not yet been fully appreciated: the true secret of wine, its real personality, comes from the land. As Francesco Winspeare states “the most important thing for us is to preserve freshness and fruitiness because too often in our area the wines are oxidised or over-matured”.

There was and still is enormous potential in Puglia and Salento, but often wine companies have become impersonal and concentrate too much on maturation and so have lost out on freshness and drinkability. “On the contrary we like reds to be young and full-coloured”, adds Francesco Marra. So basically a different approach to wine production was adopted.

The first wine to be bottled was Armecolo, followed by three labels- a white, a red and a rosé, which were given the name Santimedici. Local tradition is all important here: a rosé and a red from Negroamaro and Lecce Malvasia nera- which have been produced in Salento for centuries but with an exceptionally fresh clean taste. Today Castel di Salve produces hundreds of thousands of bottles with nine labels.

With an eye to innovation, with a combination of a modern taste and great respect for local tradition, other wines were created: Priante, Volo di Alessandro, Lama del Tenente, a pure Primitivo Cento; and lastly the excellent Aleatico. A precious collection of family jewels ready to be tasted.

In retrospect, after all the hard work, the history of the company seems simple: two young, dynamic, highly motivated entrepreneurs from a strong family agricultural tradition, with an ancient wine cellar( a fine example of industrial archeology) and vineyards at their disposal and with a common passion for wine and for doing things well. Thus in 1992 the new Castel di Salve winery was born, bringing back to life, in the same place, with the same name, the projects and the history of their ancestors, a story of wine and the winery first established here in 1885.

The Winery

The winery is in Depressa, in the ancient wine cellar which had been abandoned for many years. It was built towards the end of the nineteenth century in the village just down the road opposite the Winspeare family castle. A small monument of industrial architecture, with cross vaults in Lecce stone, following local building tradition. An example of industrial space, elsewhere wiped out during the first half of the twentieth century by the use of cement, which preserves the attraction of a building on a human scale, in harmony with its surroundings. The restoration, which involved adapting the wine-making process to modern methods, has been skilfully and tastefully carried out with minute attention to detail and this is greatly appreciated by the wine tourists who arrive here daily. They are welcomed in the tasting room after a tour following all the phases of the transformation of the grapes into wine which leads to the antique barrel cellar where Cento, Lama del Tenente and Priante are matured and refined in small oak barrels