Marina Cvetić

In 1987, Gianni Masciarelli, the visionary who put Abruzzo on the world wine map, met a young woman from Serbia named Marina Cvetić. Their meeting sparked both a marriage and a partnership that would carry the estate to an entirely new level of ambition. A few years later, in 1991, Gianni surprised his wife with a wine bearing her name: a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo built from his finest sites, made with the kind of obsessive care he reserved for his most personal projects. Marina’s own reaction, as family lore has it, was that no one outside Italy would ever manage to pronounce it. Decades later, it’s become one of the most recognized and respected names to come out of Abruzzo.

Today Marina Cvetić leads Masciarelli alongside her daughter, Miriam Lee Masciarelli, continuing the work she and Gianni began together after his untimely passing in 2008. Within the estate’s broader portfolio, which spans everyday Classic Line bottlings up through the iconic, decades-defining Villa Gemma, the Marina Cvetić line occupies its own distinct register. Where Villa Gemma is the estate’s historic flagship, the wine that first proved Abruzzo could stand among Italy’s greats, Marina Cvetić is its more intimate, more exacting counterpart: smaller-production wines drawn from a curated cross-section of parcels selected specifically to explore texture, structure, and the interplay of altitude and soil across the region.

The fruit is drawn from estate-owned vineyards spread across all four provinces of Abruzzo, Chieti, Pescara, Teramo, and L’Aquila, a range of terroir no other Abruzzese producer can claim, stretching from Adriatic-facing lowlands to cooler sites nearly 2,400 feet up in the Apennine foothills. This diversity of altitude, exposure, and soil (largely calcareous clay and limestone) gives the Marina Cvetić wines a layered complexity and sense of place that’s difficult to replicate. Farming leans on both traditional Abruzzese pergola training and the Guyot and spurred-cordon systems Gianni pioneered in the region, while winemaking favors extended aging in French barriques, a technique virtually unheard of for Montepulciano and Trebbiano before Gianni introduced it.

Stylistically, the line is defined by structure, ripeness, and real character. The Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva is dense and dark-fruited, with a silky, polished texture built to age. The Trebbiano d’Abruzzo Riserva reveals just how far this once-overlooked white grape can go, showing full body and layered aromatics rarely associated with the variety. And ISKRA, Serbian for “spark,” was created by Gianni as a personal tribute to Marina: a single-vineyard cru from a warm, high-elevation site in the Colline Teramane, offering the most concentrated and structured expression in the range.