Down in the dirty south of the Italian boot winemaking can be a shifty business.  In Puglia, the heel of the boot, a combination of very warm Mediterranean weather, conventional agriculture, and often unscrupulous business deals have held back many of the wines of the region from achieving greatness.  Scandals have plagued the region not limited to wine but also in the olive oil trade and grain and wheat growing, but luckily that trend has begun to change.  Today more and more grape growers are breaking away from the many industrial style co-ops in hopes of growing healthier grapes and make their own wine the way they want to.  So what makes Copertino different?  Well, as the times have changed so too have the methods of this winery.  The old pay scale used to be strictly based on weight of the yield.  Growers would just blast their grapes with chemicals and fertilizers, grow tons of grapes, get paid and walk away. Today Copertino (and many other forward thinking co-ops) pay the 100 members based on overall “health” of the grapes: alcohol potential, limitation of chemicals (even organic methods), etc.  This encourages growers to produce lower yields of higher quality grapes; the result is much better wine!  This is the classic expression of Salento rosso; based on negramaro and a drop of malvasia nera this is vinified in stainless steel before aging for 5 years in large oak barrels. Tradition holds strong in the Copertino co-op!