Dry white wine from italy9/1/2023 ![]() This youthful version evokes white grapefruit and quartz minerals it is pristine and radiant. Jesi, the more famous, comes from a gently hilly stretch of Adriatic coast, yielding a less extreme, more pliant expression. ![]() La Staffa Verdicchio Castelli di Jesi Superiore 2017: Verdicchio, known for an energetic greenness and vivacity, comes in two distinct regional flavours. It billows over the palate revealing a bituminous nuttiness on the back, though acidity pushes it away from overt heaviness. Made principally from garganega, the plumpest of Italy’s big three, this old vine bottling (100+ years) has the lusciousness of a honey-poached pear. Gini Soave Classico Contrada Selvarenza Vecchie Vigne 2014: Never a flashy producer, Gini has been quietly growing some of northern Italy’s finest white grapes for 400 years. (Related: 4 New Ways To Indulge In The Finest Wines In Singapore) Finally, the relative simplicity of much Italian white winemaking, with minimal new oak, gives the grapes the opportunity to shine. Another is that Italy’s almost comically variable topography and geology make regional generalisations almost futile (see Sicilian whites with the delicacy of German riesling and Alpine whites oozing voluptuousness). One is the Byzantine complexity of the DOC and DOCG classification system, which sometimes elevates wines of no particular distinction and disregards brilliant ones. The reasons I keep harping on about grapes rather than regions are manifold. These grapes’ almost universal high acidity and phenolics (the white grape equivalent of tannins) give structure and tactile mouthfeel that seem austere in youth but allow the wines to evolve complex, almost indescribable aromas as the compounds interact over time. ![]() Though mass-market summer sippers are undeniably single-season wines, even great Italian whites are often drunk well before they’ve even begun to uncoil, their aromas literally locked away in so-called aromatic precursors. That storied longevity, though, may hold the key to what many of us are missing. ![]()
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