Crib Sheet: Your Guide to Italy’s “Other” Coastal White

What do you do if you’re a wine region that’s uncool? This is a question I think about a lot, as wines come in and out of fashion in an especially fickle way. One day you’re Tove Lo, and the next, you’re Robin Thicke. Do you scramble to adapt as, say, Priorat did in the early 2000s, shifting to ripe and trendy wines? Or do you keep things as they are, as Sancerre has, and service the beast (uncool or not)?

I mention this because I’ve been thinking lately about verdicchio, the fresh and mineral white wine of Italy’s Marche region. Verdicchio was cool the way David Hasselhoff was cool—peaking sometime in the 1980s and hunting a return to repute ever since. It came to visibility as part of that first wave of simple Italian white wines that Americans enjoyed in the pre-chardonnay era: Soave, Gavi, Frascati, Orvieto and so on. These wines provided a white counterpart to Chianti, or whatever was being sold as Chablis at the time.

Even there, verdicchio was a bit of an underdog compared to, say, Soave, although its association with the Marche’s maritime culture on the Adriatic gave it a reputation for a fresh, verdant, fish-friendly wine a good 15 or 20 years before Ligurian vermentino and Campanian falanghina became a thing. It was highly visible thanks to its thin, curved bottle; some producers took that a step farther, doubling down on the sea connection with a fish-shaped bottle that, predictably, didn’t do verdicchio any favors. And the predictable did happen: verdicchio fell into that bargain bin of Italian wines discussed mostly in the past tense. Even 15 years ago, it was clear that verdicchio had fallen on hard times, and needed to find a way to offer something more.

A bit about the wines, but first, a few quick details: The verdicchio grape itself tends to have that lemony, tart fruit flavor you want in seafood wines, along with a piney side that’s reminiscent of vermentino or Campanian greco. The wine can have a bit of trebbiano (a probable relative) and malvasia mixed in. Most come from the hills west of Ancona, and you’re mostly likely to encounter Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi, sourced from vineyards west of the town of Jesi, located 12 miles inland. Jesi wines are mostly grown on limestone and that’s reflected in their frothy, bright flavors. Keep moving inland and you’ll encounter the 4,850-foot Monte San Vicino, which sets apart the Jesi area from the smaller Matelica area, which sits at higher elevation, with more marl-like soil and usually later ripening. A lot of Matelica verdicchio can be tepid, but at its best, it can offer more weight and power than Jesi.

So has verdicchio found a way to offer something more than its past would dictate? I wanted to know. While my fondness for the wine is sentimental, I’ve been thinking about it in part because I like to consider it an Italian alternative to French Muscadet—a wine utterly perfect for seafood.

Muscadet has been enjoying a quality revolution, and while it would be too much to say that the Marche’s beloved white wine is making strides as Muscadet has, there is progress. Our latest PUNCH tasting revealed that verdicchio has staged at least a modest comeback of sorts. Several higher-end examples, including those from Andrea Felici, La Marca di San Michele (Jesi) and Bisci (Matelica) show that the sort of transparent, deliberate white winemaking in fashion today—extended lees aging in concrete or old barrels—has made it to the Marche, and for the better. The notions of skin fermentation and amphorae have even been flirted with as well, though the wines are difficult to find in the U.S.

That said, there’s still plenty of verdicchio being made the way it was in its heyday—cool fermentations in steel tanks, early bottling—that follows a pinot grigio model: mediocre is good enough. And yet, the most deliberate basic examples, like that from La Staffa, show that a well-made, straightforward verdicchio is still a pleasure. That sat in counterpoint to a lot of wines that were watery and neutral, and a few that were just weird or tired.

But even when we encountered faults, it was clear that more could be made of this grape. So in the end, perhaps verdicchio’s future is a question of will—if not the will to be cool, at least the will to take itself seriously.