From the atlas
Cantina Terracanta di Soc. Agricola Ceglia s.s.
At A Glance
Producer: Cantina Terracanta di Soc. Agricola Ceglia Location: Ardea, Latium, Italy Founded: Società Agricola Ceglia 1959 Certification: DEMETER biodynamic since 1986 Grapes: Trebbiano, Malvasia, Cacchione, Montepulciano Listed wine: Sfuso d'Anfora (70% Trebbiano, 30% Malvasia) Also Produces: Extra virgin olive oil, kiwi fruit
The Producer
Cantina Terracanta sits on volcanic land in Ardea, a small town roughly thirty kilometres south of Rome. The agricultural estate behind it, Società Agricola Ceglia, was founded in 1959 when Vincenzo Ceglia left the city for the Roman countryside. The farm grew olives, kiwi, and eventually vines, and by 1986 it had earned the DEMETER mark, the international biodynamic certification that requires independent audit of every farming decision. That date matters: 1986 puts Ceglia's biodynamic commitment well ahead of Italy's natural wine conversation, which largely arrived in the 1990s.
The winery itself, Cantina Terracanta, is the third generation's contribution. Carlo and Lucia formalised it, adding spontaneous fermentation and amphora ageing to an estate that had spent four decades farming without synthetic inputs. The winery produces natural wines with spontaneous fermentation.
Place
Ardea sits in the Castelli Romani zone of southern Latium, a stretch of volcanic hills and coastal plain that supplied ancient Rome with most of its wine. The town takes its name from the Latin word for heron, and the surrounding landscape is flat near the Tyrrhenian coast before rising toward the Alban Hills. The volcanic activity that shaped this region over millennia left a distinctive soil profile: clay, sand, and silt at the surface, and a subsoil of tuff, the compressed volcanic ash that appears throughout central Italy wherever the earth has been remade by eruption.
Tuff subsoil drains freely, forces vine roots deep, and carries a mineral load that moves into the fruit. At Ardea, that mineral character takes on a saline quality, a taste of the volcanic origin that is noticeably different from the chalk or schist that drives minerality in northern Italy. The estate's vines are unirrigated, which concentrates that saline mineral character further. The label, when it exists at all, is secondary to what the ground delivers.
Soil And Site
The vineyard topsoil is a mixture of clay, sand, and silt, a combination that holds enough moisture through dry summers to sustain the vine without irrigation. Below that, the tuff subsoil provides both drainage and a dense mineral reserve. Volcanic tuff is porous, slightly alkaline, and rich in potassium and trace minerals accumulated over long geological time. Vines that root into tuff draw on those reserves throughout the growing season, and the fruit reflects it: a mineral density and saline lift that persists through fermentation and into the glass.
The estate grows twenty-five species of herbaceous plants as cover crops, sown and managed by hand as part of biodynamic practice. Those meadow plantings feed soil biology and replace the compaction and nutrient loss that bare soil farming accelerates. Biodynamic composts, also prepared by hand on the estate, complete the soil cycle. No synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, or herbicides have been used here since the 1980s.
Story
Vincenzo Ceglia was sixty-five years old when Italy joined the European Economic Community and the country's postwar agricultural boom reached its peak. He was farming outside Rome. In the 1980s his daughter Angelina took over the estate and made a decision that separated Ceglia from almost every other farm in the Castelli Romani zone: she converted the entire operation to biodynamic agriculture. That meant hand-seeding meadows of twenty-five plant species, preparing biodynamic composts manually, and submitting to annual DEMETER audits. The certification arrived in 1986 and has been renewed continuously since.
Angelina farmed the estate biodynamically for decades. When Carlo and Lucia assumed stewardship, they kept every element of that farming intact and added a winery. Cantina Terracanta opened. The name combines terra (earth) and canta (sings), and the winery's direction follows the name: spontaneous fermentation from ambient yeasts, amphora ageing for the white blend, no fining, no filtration. Where Angelina's contribution was the farming philosophy, Carlo and Lucia's was the cellar philosophy, and the two now sit together in a single range.
Vineyards And Cellar
The vineyards grow Trebbiano, Malvasia, Cacchione, and Montepulciano on the volcanic soil of Ardea. Cacchione is a historic white variety native to the Roman countryside, rarely planted outside Latium and largely absent from Italian wine export. Its presence on the estate reflects a broader commitment to local agricultural material rather than internationally recognised grapes.
In the cellar, spontaneous fermentation means no commercial yeast is added at any point. Ambient yeasts on the grape skins and in the cellar environment drive fermentation on their own timeline, which tends to run slower and produce more aromatic complexity than inoculated fermentations but also introduces variability. Whole-bunch maceration for ten days on the white blend means the skins, seeds, and stems remain in contact with the fermenting juice, extracting phenolics, texture, and aromatic compounds before pressing. After fermentation, the wine moves to amphora, the ancient clay vessel that allows slow, micro-oxidative ageing without imparting flavour. Nothing is added to clarify or filter the wine before it is packaged.
Wines
The range is built around the Sfuso d'Anfora, a white blend of seventy percent Trebbiano and thirty percent Malvasia. Trebbiano is the workhorse white grape of central Italy, high-yielding and naturally high in acidity; Malvasia brings aromatic lift and a softer, more textural quality. Together, macerated for ten days whole-bunch, they produce a wine that sits between a conventional Italian white and an orange wine: deeper in colour than a filtered Trebbiano, more phenolic on the palate, with the saline mineral character of the tuff subsoil running through the finish.
The wine is unfiltered and unclarified. Particles remain in suspension. The colour varies with the vintage and shifts further in the bottle over time. The bag-in-box format, three litres, is not a compromise: it protects an unfiltered wine from oxidation more effectively than a cork over repeated pours, and it suits daily drinking in a way that a 750ml bottle, once opened, cannot sustain without loss of quality.
Cacchione and Montepulciano are grown on the estate, but no further cuvée detail has been confirmed beyond the Sfuso d'Anfora. The estate also produces extra virgin olive oil and kiwi under the same biodynamic farming system.
In The Glass
The Sfuso d'Anfora opens with stone fruit and dried herbs, the Malvasia's aromatic signature amplified by ten days of skin contact. There is a grip on the front palate from the maceration phenolics, a texture closer to a light red than a conventional white. The acidity, driven by Trebbiano's naturally high acid levels, keeps the wine from becoming heavy; the finish is saline and mineral, with a dryness that comes from the tuff subsoil and from the decision to add nothing before bottling. What stays on the palate is a combination of the volcanic earth and the grape, uncorrected by filtration or clarification. The wine shifts over days in an open bag-in-box more slowly than it would in an open bottle, which makes the format relevant to what is in the glass.
A Bottle To Understand It
The Sfuso d'Anfora in its three-litre bag-in-box is the only confirmed wine in the range and the right place to begin. It is a macerated white blend, Trebbiano and Malvasia, fermented spontaneously, aged in amphora, and packaged unfiltered. On the palate it offers stone fruit, herbal lift, and a saline mineral finish driven by the tuff subsoil. The phenolic grip from skin contact gives it more weight than a conventional white Trebbiano, but the acidity keeps it fresh and food-friendly. The bag-in-box is functional: three litres, drawn over days, with no oxidation between pours. Start here to understand what the volcanic soil of Ardea tastes like when the winery adds nothing to conceal it.
Anecdote
In the early 1980s Angelina Ceglia took over the farm her father Vincenzo had built outside Rome and decided to convert it entirely to biodynamic agriculture. Biodynamic farming in Latium in the 1980s had no local movement behind it, no Italian wine press interested in it, and no commercial incentive: the wines of the Roman countryside were largely sold cheaply and in bulk. Angelina introduced twenty-five species of herbaceous plants, seeded and managed by hand, to replace the bare soil her father had farmed. She prepared biodynamic composts manually and submitted the estate to DEMETER audit. The certification came through in 1986. Forty years later, every vine on the property is still farmed to that same standard, and the DEMETER mark still appears on the estate's documentation.
Final Word
Cantina Terracanta is a small farm winery making one confirmed wine from volcanic land south of Rome, farmed biodynamically since the 1980s. The Sfuso d'Anfora is uncomplicated in its philosophy: whole-bunch maceration, spontaneous fermentation, amphora ageing, nothing added or removed. What it delivers is the saline mineral character of tuff subsoil in a textured, food-ready white. Three generations of farming commitment and a three-litre bag-in-box are not the typical entry point to Italian wine, but they are an honest one.
Sources
- https://www.agricolaceglia.it/
- https://www.bulk-wine.it/cantina-terracanta-il-valore-dellarmonia-con-la-terra-e-i-suoi-frutti/