In the early days of summer, I flew from Northern Italy to a favorite sun-splashed, Italian vacation spot.
But unlike the tourists visiting Sardinia, my mission wasn’t sunning myself along more than 1,000 miles of stunning coast nor bathing in its emerald waters. Nor was it exploring the island’s thousands of nuraghi—its curious, prehistoric stone constructions. (I did eventually take in all the above.)
Instead, my first stop was in Sardinia’s rugged, mountainous countryside, where a new generation of winegrowers is staging a comeback for some delicious, noteworthy wines.
Overall, Sardinian wine has been relatively slow to catch on, despite the modern wine boom in Southern Italy and on Italy’s other major island, Sicily, which is slightly larger. Sardinia’s coastal vineyard areas, foremost Gallura in the northeast, are famous for Vermentino. A dozen or so producers across the island have built reputations with their reds made from Cannonau (Grenache), Carignano (Carignan) and more.
But here in the island’s dead center, in the high-altitude vineyards of the Mandrolisai appellation, things seem to be just waking up. The landscape hasn’t changed for centuries, with sheepherding, grain farming and cork cultivation mixing with a bit of viticulture. In the past 20 years, the number of wineries has shot from less than a handful to around 30. The area’s total wine production is now around 13,000 cases annually.
Mandrolisai’s sandy-granitic slopes produce particularly well-balanced red blends that are often bargains. To be labelled as Mandrolisai DOC, wines must come from vineyards with a traditional mix of at least 35 percent Bovale Sardo (a tannic and acidic local red grape) and 20 to 35 percent each of Cannonau and the lighter, native Monica red variety, notable for its fruit and spice. Up to 10 percent of the blend can be other grapes from the area’s vineyards, which are planted to a diverse mix of everything from Nebbiolo and Barbera (owing to the island’s historic affiliation with Piedmont) to local grapes such as Pascale di Cagliari and Cagnulari.
“I call it the Châteauneuf-du-Pape of the poor,” says Emanuela Flore, the high-energy, barely five-feet-tall winemaker at the edgy and innovative Bentu Luna winery.
It’s a catchy phrase and not inaccurate when the winemaking is in capable hands like those of Flores and her team. Bentu Luna has been getting notice in Italy for working old-school vineyards but using gentle, modern, cutting-edge winemaking.
Bentu Luna moved into the area just five years ago, renting and caring organically for gnarly, old, head-trained vineyards—ranging from 35 to 118 years old. In some vineyards, they farm using an oxen-pulled plow; in others, they use a no-till technique to avoid disturbing the soil.
“When we harvest, the Cannonau is ripe, the Bovale is a bit overripe and the Monica is not quite ripe,” says Flore. “That’s what gives Mandrolisai its unique flavor.”
I’m a fan of old-vine blends, and good Mandrolisai wines like Bentu Luna’s are bright, precise and delicious.
In the sustainably built, energy-efficient winery, Flore and her team use some fairly avant-garde winemaking techniques—starting with vineyard-specific co-fermentations of the different grape varieties. Whole berries and some whole clusters are fermented with indigenous yeasts in concrete eggs and conical oak vats.
The winery is the brainchild of Gabriele Moratti, son of a powerful Northern Italian family; his late father was a billionaire oil magnate, and his mother the ex-mayor of Milan. After running his family’s Pinot Nero–based Castello di Cigognola estate up north in Oltrepò Pavese, Moratti turned his sights toward Sardinia and, eventually, Mandrolisai. He recruited Gian Matteo Baldi, who had been general manager of Sardinia’s largest estate, Sella & Mosca.
Moratti and Baldi put together an all-star team that included Giovanni Bigot from the Friuli region as consulting agronomist and Giuseppe Caviola of Piedmont’s Ca’Viola as consulting enologist, responsible for blending. Their first vintage was 2019, and that year’s Mandrolisai D.O.C. bottling—called Mari—was released two years later.
Bentu Luna chose a “socially sustainable” business model that starts with long-term leases from local farmers who are paid an annual rent of one euro per vine (about $1.10), with Bentu Luna taking over the viticulture. The amounts aren’t huge, but for many growers who had gone unpaid for years because the local cooperatives were in dire economic straits, the system provides a sustainable alternative.
Additionally, Bentu Luna offered to train and hire younger members of vineyard-owning families as part of the vineyard team. The way it has worked out, in many cases, is that “the family has two sources of income,” Flore explains. “We [typically] pay the grandfather for the vineyards, and the grandson becomes an employee. This way they are not just working for a company. They are working their land.”
Flore, 37, who was born in central Sardinia to a butcher and a hairdresser, was working as the enologist at the Mandrolisai wine cooperative when she was hired at Bentu Luna’s on-site winemaker. Flore holds multiple university degrees, covering enology, business leadership and marketing. So, when Baldi left last year, she took over—unsurprising to anyone who’s met her for five minutes. Nor is it surprising that this year she was elected president of the Mandrolisai consortium of wine producers and growers.
Today, Flore leads a team of 14 vineyard workers, all under 40 and trained by Bigot. From its more than 60 acres of old vines, Bentu Luna makes about 3,000 cases of red wine a year. In addition to its Mandrolisai D.O.C. blend, the winery produces a pair of other Sardegna Rosso wines that fall outside the appellation regulations. In its Sobi bottling, the three traditional Mandrolisai grapes are complemented by elevated percentages of Carignan and Barbera. Its flagship Be Luna, of which only 100 cases are made, is a complex blend from the winery’s oldest vineyard, just 2.5 acres of 120-year-old vines whose mix has slightly fewer Bovale vines than the D.O.C.’s minimum percentage. (An inspector actually counts the vines to determine if a site can be part of the appellation.)
With purchased grapes from the coast, the winery also makes a pair of whites: Unda is a fresh, saline version of Vermentino, and V is a full-bodied Vernaccia fermented and matured in amphora.
During my visit, I had dinner with more than a dozen new-generation producers at a local agriturismo and tasted a diverse range of grape varieties and wine styles.
For many of these winegrowers, like Flore, whose parents discouraged her from working in viticulture, their mission is personal. “This area has lacked someone to valorize the terroir that we Sardinians took for granted. And there was never any investment,” Flore says. “Now our generation realizes the strength here is that it was untouched—that here, we still listen to nature.”
