About 30 miles south of Southern Italy’s achingly beautiful Amalfi Coast lies its wild, rugged, lesser-known local cousin, the Cilento Coast. Here, in an immense national park that encompasses mountains, dense forests, olive and fig groves and the ancient Greek ruins of Paestum, Bruno De Conciliis continues to pioneer wines nearly 30 years into his career.
In the mid-1990s, this southern maverick founded Viticoltori De Conciliis with his two younger siblings on the family farm in Prignano Cilento, rising to fame as its self-taught winemaker. Then six years ago, he left and started his solo winery, called Tempa di Zoè, five miles away, near the coastal town of Agropoli.
The restless De Conciliis couldn’t stop there. He had already launched Vigneti Tardis, a natural wine line with London restaurateur-sommelier Jack Lewens in 2017. Then he led an effort to restore the lost wine legacy of the remote, tiny Campania town of Cairano (pop. 274), working out of a pop-up winery with no electricity. In his spare time, he doles out free advice to home winemakers in Cilento. The list goes on.
Now 62 years old, with a white goatee, hexagonal eyeglasses and excitable charisma, De Conciliis remembers how it all started from nothing. In what was then a backwater of wine, the trio of siblings planted native Campania varieties—white Fiano and red Aglianco—in their father’s small, north-facing vineyard composed of clay and schist soils.
Their father had initially acquired the land to discard chicken poop and cow manure. “He bought the land to throw the shit there,” Di Conciliis says, a grin lighting up his face. “He had 100,000 chickens and had to put it all somewhere.”
From the start, the De Conciliis siblings farmed organically as a “life choice”—but with a higher goal. “The real mission of Viticoltori De Conciliis was to transform the [Cilento] area from an oil producer to a territory with a great dignity as a wine producer,” he says.
They converted an old cow barn into the winery still used today. Their wines quickly gained international attention; in their second vintage, 1997, Wine Spectator rated two of the De Conciliis reds as “outstanding”: the Aglianico-based Paestum Naima (91 points, $27 on release) and a red dessert wine, Paestum Passito RA (90 points, $45/375ml on release).
In the same vintage, De Conciliis’ talents shined when he bottled his own side project: a 75-case Aglianico called Paestum Zero ($55)—the first wine he made alone without the help of an enologist. He aimed for power by drying grape bunches appassimento-style before fermentation. Wine Spectator called it “outrageous” (a compliment), rating it 92 points in a blind tasting.
The De Conciliises’ success inspired others in Cilento, where the number of wineries has since grown from a few to more than a few dozen.
De Conciliis isn’t easily pigeonholed. While his wines tend to be fermented with indigenous yeasts and use a minimum of sulfites, he has worked with a range of styles, techniques and vessels: skin-contact whites (“not my favorite wines,” he says), filtered and unfiltered wines, and steel, wood and plastic fermentors.
The only wine vessels he dislikes are amphorae. Though his siblings use them for aging the Viticoltori De Conciliis Misterioso rosé and red wines, he mocks the amphora trend as a pretentious show, “like a trophy wife.”
The Evolution of Bruno De Conciliis
It comes as no surprise that, as a university student in the 1970s, De Conciliis chose an esoteric arts-music-and-entertainment program in Bologna, and he was drawn to anarchist politics. “I wanted to make revolution,” he says of his youth.
Through the mid-1980s, he worked on a biodynamic agricultural “commune,” where he made single-variety honeys until the enterprise went under.
Then he put on a suit and went to work as a traveling salesman for an animal feed company—a life-changing move. Italy’s wine renaissance was in its early stages, and as he traveled for business, De Conciliis used his company credit card to explore the growing wine lists at fine restaurants.
“Those were the great years for Taurasi by Mastroberardino and of Jermann and Gravner in Friuli,” he says. “In Sicily, Donnafugata and Carlo Hauner, and in the Piedmont: Rinaldi, Gaja and [Giacomo Conterno’s] Monfortino.”
“I saw wine as an airplane ticket,” says De Conciliis, who also took a three-year sommelier training course. “Experiencing a good wine is like taking a trip to another land.”
De Conciliis married, became a father and rose to top management. But he found the work deadening. He quit and used his severance money to help launch the family wine company.
Fast-forward more than two decades to 2018: De Conciliis had again grown bored in his work and fought about the direction of Viticoltori De Conciliis with his more conservative brother, Luigi.
“The joy wasn’t there anymore,” De Conciliis remembers. “I said, ‘I want to have joy when I wake up in the morning.’”
De Conciliis’ sister, Paola, who oversees the vineyards at Viticoltori De Conciliis says the split was inevitable. “We couldn’t continue,” she says. “For me, the winery was the family and that was it. Bruno needs his space to do 2,000 things.”
Today, she and Luigi work with each of their sons, along with Sebastiano Fortunato, who had been an assistant winemaker to De Conciliis in the early 2000s.
“We’ve maintained the stylistic continuity,” Paola says. Viticoltori De Conciliis now produces 12 wines totaling about 12,500 cases annually, and Bruno remains a silent partner.
Tempa di Zoè: The Essence of Life in the Hills of Cilento
To house Tempa di Zoè, De Conciliis bought a never-completed winery from an aspiring vintner who ran out of cash. The winery is surrounded by biodynamic vineyards in sandstone soils; De Conciliis produces about 4,000 cases from about 30 vineyard acres on different sites.
Here, he has swung his winemaking towards racy freshness in two Fiano whites, an Aglianico rosé and a pair of Aglianico reds, including a less “outrageous” incarnation of Zero.
“I want wines that are more luminous,” he says. “My idea was to make wines based on the nervous system rather than muscle.”
This June, he expects to release his first vintage of a wine called Xenos (an ancient Greek word that can mean “guest” or “foreigner”), a 2022 blend of earthy Aglianico with fruit-driven Grenache and fresh, spicy Cabernet Franc.
“Before I die,” De Conciliis says a bit dramatically, “I wanted to make a red wine that wasn’t Aglianico.”
He has started experimenting with Fiano in a classic-method sparkling wine, and we can expect more will bubble out of him.
Just before leaving the family winery, De Conciliis received a false diagnosis of kidney cancer that convinced him the end was near.
Then, driving through central Italy, he saw a children’s preschool building stenciled with the words “Never Without Joy.”
“That,” he says, “became my slogan.”
