There’s a big difference between “cheap” and “inexpensive,” as this wine demonstrates. Even in the under-$20 universe, you can do better than the general run of sweet, simple, chemically enhanced ‘commodity’ wines that dominate most shelves—and you should endeavor to try.
The first step, of course, is to embrace lesser-known grape varieties, ones the market has (yet) to bid up in price. Ditto for lesser-known villages/regions, where conventional wisdom hasn’t (yet) caught up with modern reality. This wine, a 2015 Vermentino from the hills north of Lucca, Tuscany, checks both value boxes while being delicious, and genuinely distinctive, to boot. You can have real terroir for less than $20, it just requires a little bit of digging; for me, finding a wine like this is just as exciting as tasting a Grand Cru. Maybe even more so! The price to quality here is nearly impossible to beat. At this price, this is a wine to buy a few cases of and have around all year long. Prepare some Fritto Misto (recipe below) and open a few bottles of this Vermentino with some close friends to experience a quick escape to the Italian Riviera.
Situated in the northwest corner of Tuscany, not far from the Ligurian border, the ‘Colline Lucchesi’ DOC is a band of foothills that takes in the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Apennine mountains to the east. It is a touch cooler than many of the other Vermentino strongholds across the Mediterranean basin, including Provence (where it’s called Rolle), Corsica, and Sardinia. There’s a goodly amount of debate over Vermentino’s origins—mainly as to whether it originated in northern Italy, then traveled to France/Spain, or vice-versa—but ultimately it belongs to the Mediterranean first, a hardy variety that thrives in hot, arid climates and poor, rocky soils. At Fattoria di Fubbiano, a beautiful estate that spans 135 acres of vineyards and olive groves, Vermentino is planted on south-facing hillsides of clay and schist; although this is a distinct terroir from, say, the granite soils and blazing heat of northern Sardinia, it is still, thanks to the sheltering effect of the Apennines, a ‘maritime’ climate.
The magic of Vermentino—a variety that gets nowhere near enough love, and deserves a place on anyone’s list of top Italian whites—is how it expresses terroir. Most of the time, we talk about the ‘mineral’ imprint of a wine and how that illustrates terroir (which it does). But terroir is more than soil. It’s the “total natural environment” of a vine. What Vermentino does, much like French Muscadet or Spanish Albariño, is capture its broader environment: the fragrant tangle of Mediterranean scrub brush (which the Italians call macchia and the French call garrigue) that grows near the vines, or the saline tang of the sea air. Isn’t it possible, after all, that salty sea air might collect on the skins of grapes (much as it does your face after a day at the beach) and find its way into the wine? I think so. And that’s terroir, too, as much as any ‘mineral’ sensation one might perceive.
Winemaker Marco Corsini was born at Fubbiano, where his father, Sauro, had also made wine. He has remained at the helm of the multi-faceted farm, which was purchased by a Swiss-German businessman in the mid-1990s. All of the vineyards are farmed organically, and all of its original buildings (most dating to the 14th century) have been restored and are open for agriturismo-style tourism. This 2015 Vermentino was fermented in stainless steel, where it remained in contact with its skins for about two weeks (a maceration which lent depth and texture but no ‘orange’ color). It was left to age on its lees in steel for about six months before bottling.
In the glass, it is a glimmering green-gold, with the herbaceous Vermentino bouquet of wild sage, fennel, and fresh-cut flowers framing notes of lemon, peach, and honey. It is medium-bodied and frisky on the palate, humming with acid and mineral grip, and finishes with a kiss of sea-spray salinity. Drinking this wine transports me from a rainy, cold December in the Bay Area to a seaside trattoria on the Tuscan coast in July, where it mingles perfectly with tiny little gamberetti or a pink-skinned fillet of triglia (mullet) drizzled with forest-green Tuscan olive oil.
(It would also be awesome with a lemon-drenched fritto misto like this one). This is the kind of ‘house wine’ I want to have around for everyday drinking: a wine that says something, clearly, about its place of origin. I don’t want to settle for anything less.
