Sometimes you sit down at a table and feel, almost immediately, that something meaningful is about to unfold. That was our first tasting with the brother and sister team behind Cossignani L.E. Tempo. There were tears, real ones. Lindsay, our sales manager, still talks about it. The wines were beautiful, yes, but it was the clarity of purpose behind them and the quiet conviction that moved us most.

Letizia and Edoardo Cossignani were raised in the hills of the Menocchia Valley, a limestone rich outcropping overlooking the Adriatic. Their family name has been tied to the vine since the 1950s. Their grandfather, Saturnino, and father, Eddo, were careful stewards of the land and early adopters of high density plantings and soil protecting cover crops long before sustainability became a marketing term.

Eddo insisted his children see the world before committing to it. Letizia became a lawyer in Milan. Edoardo joined the navy and worked as a submarine engineer. In 2017, they paused and asked themselves the essential question. Return home together, or continue on separate paths?

Because of their shared love for Champagne, they chose an unconventional next step. They moved to Avize and immersed themselves in the culture and craft of traditional method sparkling wine, learning directly from growers rooted in chalk and patience. They returned to Marche not to replicate what they saw, but to translate it through their own soils and their own history.

Today, Cossignani L.E. Tempo produces exclusively metodo classico wines in Marche. The vineyards are steep and windswept, planted primarily to Pecorino and Sangiovese, with a small amount of Chardonnay. The landscape is a mosaic of white soils and marine fossils, remnants of ancient seas that left behind chalk and limestone, now forming the mineral spine of every bottle.

The estate is divided into three sites.

• Vigna San Pietro, planted in 1991, lies at 100 meters at the base of the valley and is devoted to Pecorino and Sangiovese. Calcareous sandstone soils and significant diurnal shifts give both tension and breadth.

• Vigna Passo Cattivo, planted in 2015, sits at 200 meters among deep ravines. Its mixed clay and limestone soils shape a more structured expression of Sangiovese.

• Vigna del Crinale rises to 400 meters, a high altitude sanctuary where Chardonnay roots into sedimentary rock at striking planting density, yielding crystalline precision.

Tempo, time, is intentionally folded into the name. Here, time is not something to manage, but something to honor. Only the fiore, the flower must, is used at pressing. Fermentations are carried out with indigenous yeasts. Forty percent of the base wine is reserved as vin de réserve, bridging harvests and deepening complexity. Each bottle rests in a natural cave, where silence and constant temperature allow the wines to evolve without chemical intervention.

When we asked Letizia what the winery means to her, she told us,

“Cossignani L.E. Tempo represents the perfect balance between the rugged traditions of Italian farming and a contemporary, cosmopolitan vision of wine. It is an invitation to slow down and listen to what the land has to say- one bubble at a time.”

We could not have said it better ourselves.