Pietraventosa is Marianna Annio's invention, a name she chose to describe the sunny hill beaten by northern and sirocco winds where her vineyards sit at 380 meters above sea level on the Murge Plateau in Gioia del Colle. 

She and her husband Raffaele founded the estate in 2005, driven by a desire to give Gioia del Colle Primitivo the place it deserved among Italian wines, and certified organic from their very first vintage. Marianna leads the farming and winemaking, while Raffaele  (trained as an engineer) has designed and built custom fermentation vessels for the cellar, bringing an inventor's precision to complement Marianna's vision. 

Gioia del Colle Primitivo is a fundamentally different animal from the Primitivo most people know: grown on limestone-rich soils at altitude, it produces wines that are agile and mineral rather than dark and extracted. As Marianna puts it, Manduria gives you fuller and sunnier; Gioia del Colle gives you something more lean and austere, and the Allegoria is a precise expression of that difference.