Terre Cortesi Moncaro — Marche's wine giant collapsed after paying €8.75M for Villa Medoro

Terre Cortesi Moncaro was the largest wine cooperative in the Marche region, founded in 1964 in Montecarotto. It counted 612 member growers farming 1,300 hectares and produced about 10 million bottles a year, roughly 40 percent of which were exported. It employed 58 people and was a dominant force in the Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi denomination, one of Italy's most recognised white wine appellations.

The crisis built over 2023 and broke in February 2024, when the board ousted historic president Doriano Marchetti, who had led the cooperative for 25 years. Donatella Manetti took over and faced the scale of the damage: about €25 million in debt to banks and suppliers, employees unpaid, and an €8.75 million acquisition — Villa Medoro in Abruzzo — that strained finances further. A downy mildew epidemic in 2023 devastated the harvest across central Italy, compounding the shortfall.

In August 2024 the cooperative entered a concordato preventivo — a preventive arrangement, Italy's form of bankruptcy protection. The court appointed Marcello Pollio as judicial commissioner to oversee creditor negotiations. The Istituto Marchigiano di Tutela Vini (IMT) stepped in with a storage measure for Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi, limiting yields and blocking up to 30 quintals per hectare until June 2025, to protect the denomination's value from a flood of bulk wine if Moncaro's creditors forced a fire sale.

The crisis sent a shock through the Verdicchio denomination. Producers feared that distressed bulk wine from Moncaro's cellars would collapse prices for everyone. The cooperative's troubles were described as structural — the product of rising energy and glass costs, a bad harvest, and an acquisition that proved too large for a cooperative balance sheet.