I’ve noticed a curious trend that I’ve been puzzling over while interacting with friends about wine of late. Here it is: Many friends, when offered a glass of excellent white wine, will choose an average red wine instead saying, “I don’t drink white wine anymore. I only drink red.” And at parties the red wine always runs out way before the white. Could it be that the health claims for red have people ruling out even a glass of white, in pursuit of the red wine that is supposed to be good for us? Or could it be that the over-oaked, over-ripe, New World Chardonnays that are buttery and almost sweet tasting have sent people away from white wine the way white Zinfandel caused all pink wine to become shunned 30 years ago. People have come back to pink wine in droves and I hope that the same will happen to white, because some of my best wine experiences have been with white wine. Hey, I like red wine as much as the next guy, and at the end of the summer, I look forward to the red wines I’ll be drinking in the months ahead. But I never, in the winter, turn away from white. Does that make me love white wine more than red? I’m not sure. But I don’t think so.

I could tell you about ten white wines, but I know everyone’s busy, so I’ve narrowed it down to telling you about two. Yet I would rate these two as my best wine experiences of 2012 in the category of Under $40 at retail.

Montenidoli Fiore Vernaccia 2008 – $25.99

 Paitin Elisa Roero Arneis 2010 – $17.99

The most exciting part of the food business for me has always been tasting a product that I didn’t know about, finding it delicious, and then digging for more information about the product. And it’s during this part that I realize that no one really knows about the product and therefore it is an underdog in terms of sales. When the retail price is lower than I think it should be it makes this process even more exciting. When I can honestly say to friends and customers, “If this isn’t the best ten dollars/five dollars you’ve spent recently, I’ll give you your money back.” I love bolstering the underdog.

Paitin Arneis

Italy is mostly known for its red wines—which is as it should be—but I’ve recently had an experience with two of its whites that have been fantastic. Both of these Italian whites that I’ve fallen in love with are made from native Italian grapes. Here’s the reason most people have never tasted them. For an obscure grape from Europe to be accepted in America it must travel well, which in the wine trade means that you must plant the grape in other parts of the world away from its native terroir, and it will produce reasonably good wine. Two of these grapes are Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc. Here’s what I mean… If Sauvignon Blanc hadn’t done well in places like California, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, most people wouldn’t know the grape, and it would be harder to sell a bottle of Sancerre, which is a Sauvignon Blanc from France’s Loire River Valley. The two grapes I’m going discuss here, Arneis and Vernaccia, do not travel well. The fact that they don’t makes them more appealing to me, but also keeps them as underdogs.

The Wines… I’m not going to give you a bunch of wine gobbletygoop about scents of honeysuckle and overtones of pear. Why would I do that? That’s like telling someone what’s inside the box of a gift. It’ll ruin what’s inside. I’ll let you discover that yourself. What I can tell you is that both of these wines gave me two of my best wine experiences for under $50 of 2012, and that both show great restraint while displaying amazing elegance. If I were going to parallel how I experience the wine to music, I would say that these wines have beautiful melodies without any wild crescendos or drum solos, and their complexity and balance make them great companions to spend an evening with. Both wines are made from 100% of the indigenous grape on the label and both vineyards farm their grapes organically.

The grapes… Arneis translates literally to mean “the rascal” due to its stubborn nature and the fact that it’s a hard grape to grow. It’s grown in different parts of Italy, but the best wines come from the northwest of Italy in the region of Piedmont.

Vernaccia comes from the word Vernacula, which means “indigenous” and it usually precedes the part of Italy from where it was grown. In this case, Vernaccia di San Gimignano.

The Family and the Winery… “Fagiuoli and her husband Sergio founded their winery in 1965, on their hillside property across a little valley from the picturesque Tuscan town of San Gimignano. Montenidoli means “mountain of little nests” and with its forested reaches and populations of swallows it’s easy to understand how it came by that name. San Gimignano, known for its many intact Medieval clock towers and surrounding wine, is quite famous in the wine world for being awarded the very first DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) designation of anywhere in Italy. This honor was no doubt due, in part, to the

Montenidoli Vernaccia

historical significance of Vernaccia de San Gimignano which has been famous since at least as far back as the Renaissance, where it was a favorite of the sculptor Michelangelo.

Fagiuoli’s land sits on a bulge of some of the oldest rock in Italy, and she claims that it was planted to vines first by the Etruscans, whose 7th century BC civilization lends Tuscany its name. She and her husband own about 900 acres on the top of her hill, of which most is essentially a nature preserve — ancient forest and wildness. Out of this forest the Fagiuolis have carefully coaxed about 57 acres of vines, olives, and farmland.

Part of their inspiration for becoming vintners was the discovery of ancient olive trees overgrown with brambles that they believe are as old as the stone home they moved into on the property, which dates back to the 13th Century and was purportedly constructed by the Knights Templar.

Since breaking ground in the late 1960s, insecticides and herbicides have never been used on the vineyards, and the Fagiuolis avoid the use of copper and sulfur on the vines except in dire circumstances. The grapes are harvested by hand, carefully sorted, and then destemmed and crushed.

The winemaking is mostly done in what might be called an ancient style, with the primary concession to modernity being temperature controlled steel tanks for the white wines.

…Elisabetta is both the viticulturalist and the winemaker, and ultimately the keeper of the soul of Montenidoli and its wines. She is widely credited with singlehandedly elevating Vernaccia di San Gimignano to a new level of quality, and continues to make some of Tuscany’s most distinct wines, now from vines that are 50 or more years old. Her label bears the words “Sono Montenidoli” or “Only Montenidoli” in reference to the fact that the wines have always been, and will always be, only from grapes that she tends herself.

Without question, her white wines are some of the best made in Tuscany, and are incredible values. They are some of the most exciting things I have put into my mouth in 2011 and I highly recommend seeking them out.”  – Alder Yarrow  Vinography.com

At 3 Cups at any given time, we have 300 to 500 different wines. For every wine on our shelf, we have tasted many more that did not make the cut. Here is what we are focused on: we are looking for natural wines that taste more complex and interesting in your glass than you have to pay at the cash register. And we’re trying desperately to keep “clunkers” off our shelves.
What’s a “clunker”? A clunker is a wine that is overpriced, or has too much alcohol, or is so monolithic or unilateral in its flavor that after a couple of sips, you are bored by it. A clunker is a wine that does not pair well with food because it often lacks acidity and tastes too much like fruit juice.
I haven’t tasted all the wines at 3 Cups, but I’ve tasted my fair share. And here is one that I feel exemplifies the line “tastes more expensive than it costs.”

Bisson Vermentino 2011:
Vermentino is an indigenous Italian grape that, as the Italians say, doesn’t travel well. What they mean is that it doesn’t grow well in places other than where it grew up, in this case, in the Ligurian coast of Italy. It is grown widely in the Corsica, Sardinia, and Liguria regions of Italy.
I happen to love the flavor of Vermentino, but it is a grape most Americans have never tasted – unless they’ve had a carafe of it in a village trattoria in Italy, represented there as the local wine. Matt Kramer, author of Making Sense of Italian Wine, says, “A good Vermentino can be intensely flavorful with an extravagant, pungent herbal scent (sage, mint) and a definite note of bitter almonds.”
I personally fell in love with this wine last year when it was served to me with Peter Roy’s crab salad. This wine is simply spectacular with crab and fish dishes. I’ve always liked underdogs, and what chance does the Vermentino grape have to show its stuff here in America? One of our jobs at 3 Cups is to try to discover and shine the light on these underdogs that are often under priced because they won’t sell at what they’re worth. Someone could buy a bottle of fancy California Chardonnay for what this bottle is worth. To me, this tastes like a $50 white Bordeaux.