Before becoming one of the world’s most celebrated ice cream makers, Guido Martinetti dreamed of making wine.
Born in 1974 in Turin, the capital of Italy’s Piedmont region, Martinetti grew up with a passion for the countryside and for fine winemaking that he shared with his father, a public-relations specialist.
His hero was Piedmont’s most famous wine revolutionary. “I grew up with the myth of Angelo Gaja,” says Martinetti with a laugh. “Gaja and God are the same for me.”
Martinetti studied agronomy and earned a master’s degree in viticulture and enology; as a harvest intern, he worked crushes from Bordeaux’s Château Margaux to Piedmont’s Vigneti Massa.
After graduation, he did some wine consulting. He once called Gaja and offered his services as a driver for free. Gaja turned him down, but Gaja agronomist and enologist Federico Curtaz accepted and, for five months in 2001, Martinetti drove and learned.
How Grom Gelato Began
The day of Aug. 10, 2002 was life-changing for Martinetti, who spent that morning on a “spying” mission in Gaja’s famed Sorì San Lorenzo vineyard “to understand the logic of the green harvest there.”
That day (coincidentally San Lorenzo Day in Italy), he stopped at a bar and picked up a newspaper containing an article by Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini decrying that gelato was no longer the way it once was.
“And I said, ‘Why not make ice cream the way Gaja makes wine?’” remembers Martinetti, who is tall, lanky and intense. “With the best ingredients and with fruit grown the way Gaja grows grapes.”
Martinetti knew nothing about ice cream, but he shared his idea with Federico Grom, his close friend from a year of obligatory Italian military service. Grom, then a financial manager for an auto-parts supplier, devised a business plan.
The following year, the first Grom gelato store opened in Turin—the name chosen because, Martinetti says, “Grom is like Gaja: four letters that start with G.”
The Grom guys enjoyed incredible success—with Martinetti handling production and dealing with farmers and other suppliers, while Grom oversaw finances. The company boomed to 100 stores and 1,000 employees worldwide over the next decade.
In 2008, with a mission of growing some of the best organic fruit, the men used their profits to buy 20 acres of farmland in the town of Costigliole d’Asti in the Barbera d’Asti appellation.
Martinetti grew apricots, peaches, pears and figs and experimented with different varieties of melons and strawberries. With his obsessively studious mind, Martinetti became a fruit geek.
“If I made strawberry sorbets and used Annabelle strawberries for one, Camarosa strawberries for another, Ciflorette and Candonga strawberries for others, and we did a blind tasting, you would taste the difference!” Martinetti enthuses.
The Creation of Mura Mura
The company received a shock in 2014 when a cool summer in Turin and other key markets translated to lower gelato sales and a drop in revenues. Multinational giant Unilever stepped in with an attractive offer for the company, one that, says Martinetti, “would allow me to return to my dream of wine.”
They sold in 2015 and remained co-CEOs of the company for the next four years, while starting on their adventure in wine.
The men christened their farm in Costigliole d’Asti with a term from the vanilla-growing island of Madagascar: Mura Mura, which refers to a slow, patient life. They began buying up old vineyards and land on the marl hillsides above their farm.
Today, Mura Mura encompasses 25 vineyard acres of Piedmont native grape varieties, including reds Barbera, Grignolino, Nebbiolo and Ruché and whites Favorita (Vermentino) and Muscat.
But they weren’t content to stay local. Over five years, starting in 2016, they began buying up vineyard plots in neighboring Langhe appellations to the southwest—including 8.5 acres in Barbaresco crus (Serragrilli, Starderi, Currà and Roncaglie) as well as 3 acres in the Sorano cru in the Barolo commune of Serralunga d’Alba.
They built a winery into the hillside at Mura Mura and bought a rare license to vinify Barolo and Barbaresco wines there outside of those appellations. In the last couple of years, they’ve added a restaurant and 14 tony guest rooms, including one in its own cabin that sits like a treehouse amid the vines.
Mura Mura today produces a dozen wines, topped by its line of Barbaresco and Barolo crus—some of which are debuting this year. The winery’s 3,000-case production is now sourced entirely from estate grapes except for its white Derthona (Timorasso), made from purchased fruit since the 2021 vintage.
The common thread among all the wines is a velvety smoothness devoid of rusticity or sharp angles—even in often-tart Grignolino, a wine that Marinetti calls “my obsession.” Talking about “balance” is a bit overdone these days, but Martinetti applies it to everything.
“In ice cream, the main opposites are sweetness and bitterness,” he says. “In wine, you have to also balance alcohol and acidity and structure. I want to make wines of power and elegance with little bitterness. The concept is harmony.”
Goals in Wine, Gelato and Life
Martinetti’s paragon of harmony is a life-altering $130 cup of green tea he drank in Kyoto in 2010—made using the tender first leaves steeped in water that was only halfway to a boil.
He says the memory of that cup influences the way he makes wine with his small, young team. The process starts in the vineyard, where Mura Mura crews keep vines intact by rolling excessive top growth around guide wires rather than pruning the shoots. The grapes are fermented in conical oak casks with indigenous yeasts at low temperatures.
“The goal with [grapes], generally speaking, is to have very good chewy skin at perfect ripeness,” he says. “When you have perfectly ripe skins—especially in Nebbiolo and Grignolino—that is the key of the key.”
Mura Mura ages its cru wines in large casks, followed by one year in Clayver stoneware “barrels” that provide low-level oxygenation without imparting the influence of wood tannins that comes with using oak barrels.
Martinetti and Grom aren’t finished with gelato. They recently launched a commercial supermarket line of low-calorie ice cream called Lec with Formula One driver Charles Leclerc of Team Ferrari.
“Gelato is more a project of the mind,” says Martinetti. “But my deepest soul is in wine.”
