Villa Mottura
It was 1927 when Pasquale Mottura looked out over the vast stretches of vineyards he had gradually set up over the years, hectare by hectare, with his sacrifices and dedication, and decided to give new life to the fruit of his work by founding one of the most important wineries on the Salento peninsula.
After more than 80 years of history in which Pasquale’s love of the land and care of his vineyards have been handed down like a precious inheritance from father to son over four generations, Mottura is now a leading maker of quality wines in the Salento and in Italy, combining respect for tradition with new professional skills and technological innovation.
The Mottura estate is located in Tuglie, a small town in the southern part of the Salento Peninsula. The building is still the original one, a beautiful late 19th century farmhouse in Baroque style, whose cellars hide the secrets of an ancient family villa. This is where the wines slowly age in oak barrels and barriques to develop the aromas, colours and atmospheres of the land.
In almost a century of history Mottura has made great steps forward, changing and growing as wine-making on the Salento peninsula has evolved and changed for the better.
As early as the ’40s big iron-ringed barrels of Mottura wines were loaded onto northbound trains in Tuglie, headed for three plants in Naples, Rome and Milan where the wines of the Salento peninsula were distributed and appreciated. But the estate wanted to go beyond this, and in the ’60s it became one of the first wineries in the area to bottle its own wine. The goal that was to characterise the Mottura brand emerged right from the start: combining big numbers with appreciable, genuine quality.
But when you’ve been making genuine wines every day for four generations, you’re ready for a new challenge, to offer more and more innovative products of better and better quality while preserving and revitalising tradition.
The result has been new product lines, already known and appreciated the world over, such as I Classiciand Le Pitre, the award-winning line of wines with which Mottura presents a modern expression of the potential of local grape varieties, drawing attention to the traditional varieties of the Salento such as Negroamaro and Primitivo, cultivating the vines according to the historic technique known as “ad alberello” and preserving traditional wine-making methods.