Villa Bucci sits in the hills above Ostra Vetere, in the heart of the Castelli di Jesi appellation in the Marche. The estate has bottled wine since 1983, first under the late Ampelio Bucci's reading of Verdicchio and now under Federico Veronesi, with the same patient style: long ageing in eighty-year-old Slavonian oak botti, organic certified vineyards, and a refusal to follow trend.
Marche
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Villa Bucci does not run a regular cellar door. Private visits and tastings are arranged on request only, by email or phone, subject to the team's availability. The underground cellar and the fifty to seventy-five hectolitre Slavonian botti sit about thirty kilometres inland from Senigallia.
EnquireVilla Bucci does not run a regular cellar door. Private visits and tastings are arranged on request only, by email or phone, subject to the team's availability. The underground cellar and the fifty to seventy-five hectolitre Slavonian botti sit about thirty kilometres inland from Senigallia.
EnquireThe Bucci family has farmed these four hundred hectares of Marchigiano hills since the eighteenth century, growing wheat, sunflower, peas and olives alongside the vines. The wine project itself is younger. In 1983, Ampelio Bucci, born in nearby Montecarotto, decided to bottle the family's Verdicchio under his own label, treating the grape as the structural equal of any northern Italian white. The philosophy that emerged ran against the prevailing direction in Castelli di Jesi: low yields of around sixty to seventy quintals per hectare, late picking, and patient ageing instead of early-release fruit-forward wines.
The vineyards span thirty-one hectares across three communes inside the Castelli di Jesi DOC zone: Montecarotto, Serra de' Conti and Ostra Vetere. Twenty-five hectares are Verdicchio, the rest Sangiovese and Montepulciano destined for Rosso Piceno. The vines average around thirty-five years of age and sit on the limestone and clay soils that distinguish the inland half of Marche, with Adriatic sea breezes cooling the slopes by night. Cultivation has been certified organic for years, audited under the EU organic regime through the consortium-recognised CEE 'da Agricoltura Biologica' mark.
The cellar is underground and built around very large, very old casks. The fifty to seventy-five hectolitre Slavonian oak botti the estate uses for both whites and reds are roughly eighty years old, exhausted of any oak flavour, and serve only to allow the slow micro-oxygenation that lengthens the wines without imprinting wood. Bucci Classico, the basic Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi DOC Classico Superiore, sees stainless steel before time in botte. Villa Bucci Riserva, the Castelli di Jesi Verdicchio Riserva DOCG, is the long-aged top white. Pongelli and Villa Bucci Rosso are the Rosso Piceno DOC reds, made from roughly equal parts Sangiovese and Montepulciano in the same large old botti as the whites.
After leading the cantina for forty years, Ampelio Bucci handed the reins to Federico Veronesi in July 2024. The team and the method are unchanged. Production sits at around 100,000 to 120,000 bottles of Verdicchio plus 20,000 to 30,000 bottles of Rosso Piceno a year, sold across markets well beyond Italy. The estate is not a regular cellar-door operation: tastings and tours are by arrangement only, and Bucci wines are encountered most often in restaurants and specialist merchants from Milan to Tokyo.
Editorially verified by ItalianWines.co.uk.
Plate I · MARCHE
Est. 1983 
Tastings
Tours
Accommodation
Walk-ins welcome 
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