Gioia del Colle

We drove out to Gioia del Colle on a tip from a cheesemaker in Bari who told us, with the flat certainty of someone stating a fact rather than an opinion, that the mozzarella here was better than anything sold under that name anywhere else in Italy, DOP status included. Gioia del Colle mozzarella comes from a particular breed of cattle grazed on the Murgia’s rough pasture, and the dairies around town still make it fresh each morning — we bought a ball still warm from the vat, wrapped in paper, and ate it standing outside the shop with nothing but a drizzle of local oil, because it seemed disrespectful to wait.

The town itself centres on an imposing Norman-Swabian castle, square and fortified in the same tradition as Castel del Monte but far less visited, and with a genuinely surprising history: Frederick II, the medieval Holy Roman Emperor famous for his intellectual court and his falconry treatise, held residence here, and his daughter Violante is said to have been born within these walls. We wandered the castle’s courtyard and climbed to the ramparts, looking out over a landscape of vineyards that produces Primitivo di Gioia del Colle — a DOC distinct from and, some locals insist rather firmly, superior to the more famous Manduria version.

We spent an afternoon at a small cantina outside town tasting that primitivo straight from the barrel, a dense, dark wine with none of the polish of an export bottle and all of the character, and Lia bought two bottles that did not survive the drive back to where we were staying. The winemaker, an older man with the sun-cured face of someone who has spent sixty years outdoors, told us proudly that Gioia del Colle’s wine had been protected by DOC status since the 1970s, decades before Manduria caught up, and seemed personally offended that Manduria gets the international recognition.

We left with a cooler bag of mozzarella that didn’t last the week and a renewed, slightly defensive loyalty to a wine we’d never heard of a month earlier. Gioia del Colle does not need visitors to validate what it already knows about itself, which might be exactly why it tastes this good.

When to go: Late summer through the September harvest is ideal for the vineyards and cantina visits. The mozzarella and castle are worth a visit any time of year, though buy the cheese in the morning, when it’s freshest.