Fattoria Mancini

Fattoria Mancini is at Pesaro, on the northernmost edge of the Marche, where the land rises into the Monte San Bartolo natural park and then falls away to the Adriatic. The estate has been in the family since 1861 and farms around twenty hectares entirely inside the park, on the hills above the Focara cliffs and around the village of Roncaglia. Luigi Mancini, the fifth generation, runs it.

What makes the place unusual is the Pinot Noir. It arrived here around 1810, under the Napoleonic administration of Eugene de Beauharnais, Napoleon's adopted son, who had it planted on estates taken from the Church. In 1861 the Mancini family bought one of those properties and have propagated the same vines ever since. Two centuries of adaptation changed the original French clone enough that the University of Milan's viticulture department studied it in 1998, and in December 2001 it was registered as an Italian national variety in its own right under the name Pinot Nero Pesaro. The hill of Focara got its own DOC for Pinot Noir in 2000. Since 2005 every new planting on the estate has used the family's own selection.

The site does the rest. This stretch of coast faces north, catches the winds off northern Europe and misses the warm currents that soften the rest of the Adriatic, so it is markedly cooler than the Marche inland. The soil is calcareous sandstone with a lot of silt. The vineyards sit between 100 and 150 metres, some of them only 200 metres from the water. Everything is picked by hand into 15 kg crates and chilled straight away.

Mancini only ever vinify their own grapes. Herbicides have gone, the soil is worked mechanically, and the fertiliser is manure from farms nearby, which is what you would expect of a working vineyard inside a protected park. Alongside Pinot Noir they grow Sangiovese, Ancellotta and Albanella, a local grape almost nobody outside the province has heard of.

The other thing they are known for is Pinot Noir made as a white wine. They have been doing it for over forty years, and Impero Blanc de Pinot Noir, first bottled from the 1998 harvest, is now the estate's flagship. Luigi Mancini's work on training systems earned the estate an invitation to the International Pinot Noir Celebration in Oregon, one of only ten producers from outside the United States asked.

JNoir is the young-vine Pinot Noir, short maceration and no oak. Focara is the classic estate red, half of it aged in barrel. Impero is the white Pinot Noir. Raje is the Sangiovese, first made in 2024, which absorbed the older single-vineyard Sangiovese Rive.

Above those sit the two vineyard-selection Pinot Noirs, Rive di Focara and i Terrazzi di Focara, and the Impero Brut sparkling.