White wines for aging

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Among the great changes that have affected Italian wine in the last twenty years, white wines have perhaps been among the most dynamic protagonists.

In fact, if until the 1990s, Italian white wines were seen as immediate products to be drunk young (and they still are in the imagination of the average consumer), the trade press and international operators have begun to re-evaluate them even in the long term.

Cutting-edge technology
This is certainly due to a technology that has improved over time, which combines vineyard and cellar techniques aimed at enhancing the aromas, maintaining the acidity thus ensuring longevity, and preserving the territorial and varietal characteristics.
Separate harvests, dry ice, soft pressing and tamping, cryomaceration, must stabling, thoughtful management of malolactic fermentation, sulphur dioxide and small wood – even though some producers were already using it at the beginning of the 1980s – use of latest-generation biotechnologies such as selected yeasts and bacteria, organic nutrients and antioxidant tannins.

Stereotypes that are now old
Thus, a few years ago even the foreign press began to talk about Italian wines that know how to age gracefully.
The realm of longevity is no longer reserved only for Chablis and Sancerres, Pouilly-Fumés and Rieslings.
Kerin O'Keefe talks about it in an article of hers from 2014 entitled precisely Aging Gracefully, subtitle These Italian white wines defy the drink-now stereotype and Michael Apstein also breaks the stereotype of Italian wines to be drunk young in his article, also from 2014, which reads: Age-Worthy Italian Wine is not an oxymoron.

Among the reasons for this lack of consideration is the difficulty in finding aged Italian white wines in wine shops, at auctions or on restaurant menus, especially those in Italy, which until a few years ago favored reds: it is easier to find a 2004 Roero Arneis by Fratelli Brovia in New York at The Spotted Pig in the West Village than in Piedmont.

Symbol regions
To demonstrate the mettle of white wine in the Belpaese there are historic and less historic regions; the unmissable one is the Friuli Venezia Giulia, with its great white wines that were already making people talk about them in the Big Apple in the 1990s.
Here is also the suave which in the last decade has been able to attract attention to its products thanks to the valorization of the volcanic component and the resistance over time with ad hoc tastings that have involved numerous foreign press, contributing to raise the receptors towards the entire Italian territory.

Also essential is Verdicchio, both from Matelica – which celebrated 21 years of DOC last July 50st – but also the version from Castelli di Jesi.
About five years ago, the Consorzio Tutela Vini Marchigiano had organized a tasting of old vintages aged in the Frasassi Caves, with remarkable results. The white wines for aging have also become the banner of the rebirth of the wine-producing South: any tasting aimed at investigating the longevity of the white wines cannot leave out the Fiano and Greco di Tufo of the Campania, as well as certain Etna Biancos of the Sicilia.

And if up to now we have talked about native vines, we cannot fail to mention the variations of Chardonnay from the Aosta Valley as well as the Umbrian interpretation of Cervaro della Sala.

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