2023 Tenuta Tre Gemme Renascenzia Bianco Abruzzo

There's a wine from this exact grape that critics and collectors call one of the greatest and most mysterious white wines on earth — Valentini's Trebbiano d'Abruzzo, which ages like a great white Burgundy for decades and now sells for around $400 a bottle when you can find it. For most of the wine world, Trebbiano was written off as neutral, forgettable, a workhorse grape. Valentini proved otherwise. Renascenzia is Tenuta Tre Gemme's own homage to that same grape, grown a short drive away on the family's organic hillside vineyards.

Tenuta Tre Gemme was founded by Don Rocco Perrucci, a Catignano landowner whose family has worked this Abruzzo land since the early 1800s. His daughters, Carla and Anna Perrucci, now run the estate — 70 hectares of organic vines split across two adjoining plots in the Terra dei Vestini, named for the ancient Italic tribe who lived here before Rome. The estate itself takes its name, "Tre Gemme" (Three Gems), from a thousand-year-old carved shrine of St. Anne and the Madonna child found at the property's edge, its three gems symbolizing intellect, heart, and earth.

Renascenzia — the name itself evokes "rebirth" — is made the traditional way: fermented in oak, then aged further in amphora, a method almost nobody uses anymore but one that lets the wine develop real texture and depth without losing the grape's natural brightness. It's a slower, more deliberate process than most everyday whites get, and it shows.

Trebbiano d'Abruzzo sits at elevations between 350 and 450 meters here, halfway between the Adriatic coast and the Gran Sasso mountains, where wide day-to-night temperature swings keep the acidity vivid even as the fruit ripens fully. This isn't the throwaway Trebbiano poured by the carafe in a hundred Italian restaurants — it's the same grape that, in serious hands, has proven it belongs among Italy's finest whites.

Treat it the way you'd treat a white Burgundy. Open it at the table, not on the porch.