Today the Italian wine world lost one of its greatest men. Ampelio Bucci passed away at the age of 89.
Terrible news. Ampelio Bucci is gone. He had not been well for several months but we hoped he would recover. Instead, he didn’t make it.
He was born in 1936, so he was 89 years old and had been ill for some time. To me he was a dear friend, beyond the fact that he produced splendid wines in his beloved Castelli di Jesi. A man with whom it was really pleasant to talk about maximum systems and wines, of course. He joined his friends Giorgio Grai and Paola Di Mauro, with whom he shared the booth at Vinitaly for years. Grai has also been his winemaker since the beginning in the 1980s. May the earth be kind to him. Hello Ampelio.
Daniele Cernilli, Marina Thompson and the entire DoctorWine editorial staff join in the grief of Vanda and her loved ones.
Who was Ampelio Bucci
Born in the province of Ancona, with a degree in economics in the 1960s from Milan’s Bocconi University, after an early career in fashion and design, Bucci had returned to the Marche region to found Villa Bucci, the winery that revolutionized the world of Verdicchio. Contrary to the trend of consuming young white wines, Ampelio Bucci had firmly believed in Verdicchio’s ability to age. Hence the large Slavonian oak barrels and the pioneering demonstration that his wines could evolve over time in extraordinary ways.
In 2021, Castelli di Jesi Verdicchio Classico Riserva Villa Bucci 2019 ranked second in The Enthusiast 100: The Best Wines of 2021, establishing itself as the world’s finest Italian white wine. In The Essential Guide to Italian Wines 2023 by DoctorWine it was awarded White Wine of the Year with Castelli di Jesi Verdicchio Classico Riserva Villa Bucci 2019 and in the 2017 with vintage 2013.
A professor at Bocconi University in Milan, his Villa Bucci winery, in Ostra Vetere in the province of Ancona, was sold in 2024 to Oniverse, the Veronesi family’s group of wineries, who also own Signorvino.
