business travels. His son Damian (now
the Doffo Winery production manager)
explained that Marcelo will accumulate
enough bikes to send home in a shipping
container. “It used to be easier to fill a
container with vintage motorcycles at rea-
sonable prices,” Damian says, “but prices
have gone up.”
Marcelo purchases bikes he remem-
bers from his childhood, and they are
mostly bikes that are small, Italian and
have interesting features — and are
machines he couldn’t afford when young-
er. “The bikes I search for must be small cc
European motorcycles with some special
characteristic,” Marcelo says. The Doffos
buy both restoration projects and, when
possible, complete motorcycles.
Marcelo and Damian do nearly all of
the restoration work themselves includ-
ing painting and pinstriping (a task
handled personally by Marcelo), and
the MotoDoffo Collection now includes
something north of 150 motorcycles. The
Doffo Winery has a building dedicated
to motorcycle restoration and maintain-
ing their racing fleet, and Damian says a
restoration can take up to two years. The
principle challenges have been finding
parts for the unique machines they tend
to buy, and not “over-restoring” the bikes:
The Doffos want their bikes to look like
they did when new, not better than new.
One particularly interesting motorcycle
is an iconic bike from Marcelo’s youth,
a magnificent Gilera 500cc Saturno.A 1959 125cc Ducati twin-cam GP (middle). The 1962 125cc, 2-stroke Vicentina
that started it all for Marcelo has an Italian engine in an Argentinean frame (above).60 MOTORCYCLE CLASSICS September/October 2017