Marica Bonomo
Italy
Marica's Wines
- Italy
- 7Â wines
- 5Â styles
Your 2023 Naked Winemaker of the Year is... the fabulously talented, the one, the only... Marica Bonomo!
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We knew Marica would be a perfect fit for Naked when she joined us back in 2022, and that Angels would love her wines. But to go from a standing start to Winemaker of the Year in just two years is nothing short of extraordinary.
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Marica is exactly the kind of hard-working, humble but uber-talented winemaker Naked was set up to support. A third generation winemaker, her family have been crafting top-quality Italian wines for 66 years, up in the hills near Lake Garda in the Veneto region. They don’t use pesticides or herbicides, and can paper the walls of their recently renovated, solar-powered winery with so many sustainability credentials and certificates. And by producing only wines that come from their own vineyards, Marica knows the identity and soul of every single grape that goes into them.
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In recent years, Marica’s wines have started to get noticed in high places, including being named in the ‘Top 100 Wines’ in the world by Wine Spectator. And now she’s topped it all by being named your 2023 Winemaker of the Year. It couldn't have happened to a nicer lady.
Vineyard Location
Marica Bonomo's Story
Marica's Story
I started making wine 23 years ago, but life is a university for this type of work, you never finish learning from the vintages, from your territory, from the mistakes.
I studied law at university and I was abstemia. To pay for my university, I started to work in the winery of my family: harvest, cleaning of the cellar, wine shop, and step by step I have increased my role. When I finished university I became a lawyer, but the value that I learnt during my work in the winery thanks to my father and the open mind this work is gifting us, made me decide to come back in this business. At the end it was not a decision but an evolution about my sensibility and passion.
I think that in Italy we do not have many books that explain the evolution of our history in wines, what we have is from a new generation. In Italy we have a strong patrimony of culture in wines that is transmitted by daily word from a father to his son… for me it was the most normal way to start talking with my father. He taught me a lot and transmitted a lot of passion and the “hunger to discover”. So I understood that this is an important role to preserve our genetics for the future.
As a winemaker, I’m feeling like a director, not an actor. So my rule is to give the chance to indigenous grapes and a unique land “the morainic Hills” to talk in a glass.
By producing only wines that come from our vineyards, we know very well their feedback. And by being humble, it permits us to make the territory the main actor in a glass of wine.
Our family is the biggest owner of vineyards of this appellation, and year by year we’ve completed a strong work of zonation inside our property. We vinified every grape of every vineyard in a single way, so we knew the identity and the soul that every single grape has. Very important when you have to build a wine made with different grapes like Custoza, Bardolino and Chiaretto di Bardolino are.
For sure Custoza and Bardolino are not the most well known wines of Italy in the world, so when I started to introduce our wines to the most important opinion leaders in the world, I found a lot of closed doors in front of me.
My father always told me that I have to thank you for this, because I will learn more from a sorrow than from a success.
And that’s what I tried to do. Sometimes you think of a wine just for what you tasted since last time, and when you have the opportunity to taste a good wine, your opinion starts to become more curious. And that’s what I did. Now our wines have obtained a lot of attention from the most important opinion leaders of the world and a lot of wine lovers appreciated it.
At the end, the mandatory work of a winemaker is to produce quality knowing your vineyards, and I can assure you can gift long life also in the Garda Lake with beautiful expression of elegance and character.
What’s my favourite grape? I’m a white lover, so for me Garganega of Garda Lake is my love at first sight. Most of the people know Garganega like the top grape of Soave, but we work hard to develop the same concept also for the Garganega of Garda Lake.
My most memorable moment making wine was last year, when with our Custoza we were included in the top 100 best wines of Wine Spectator List. Can you imagine? My baby Custoza 59° in the top list.
We feel a very important responsibility to preserve our territory, so the support of the Angels is really important. We work all our vineyards in a sustainable way, and we also have vineyards of 63 years old, and to work in this way we have a lot of extra costs.
We are also doing important projects in the cellar to develop warehouses, experimental cellars, all in a green mood, this to respect our planet, but also to gift the time to the wine in the bottles to talk better when our wine lovers will decide to open and enjoy it.
But… if you don’t trust me, come to our vineyards and enjoy a good aperitiv with us, we will be very happy to know a lot of wine friends from which for sure we will learn a lot.
