The Coast, in White

Tua Rita is known for one thing: Redigaffi, the hundred-percent Merlot from Suvereto that in the late nineties earned the estate a place among the Tuscan cult wines and prices to match. Most people who know the name know it for that bottle and its Cabernet sibling, Giusto di Notri.

The estate makes a white too, and it is the opposite of a cult wine. Perlato del Bosco Bianco is Vermentino — the grape that grows the length of the Tyrrhenian coast from Liguria down through the Maremma, that the coast drinks with its own seafood and rarely exports with any fanfare. Tua Rita’s version comes from the hills above Suvereto, between the Metalliferous Hills and the sea, and is made entirely in steel: no oak, no ambition to be anything other than a coastal white.

The label, a Klimt-like figure in gold and rust, is the same one the estate’s red Perlato del Bosco wears, and it is the most decorative thing about the wine.

The Year

2019 on the Tuscan coast was a good, balanced season — a cool, wet spring that delayed things, then a warm summer without the extremes of 2017, and a harvest that came in with ripeness and acidity both intact. For an aromatic white made without wood, that combination is most of what matters.

In the Glass

Opened at the office just before midnight, a little over a year from the harvest.

Pale straw, bright. The nose was immediate — white peach and citrus, a tropical edge of pineapple, white flowers over the top and a green, herbal note underneath that kept it from being simply fruity. Very clean.

The palate was crisp and dry, medium-bodied, with a saline edge and a faintly bitter almond finish that is Vermentino’s signature and the thing that makes it work with food. Good acidity, moderate length, no pretence.

It is a wine with a strong personality and no complications, from an estate whose reputation rests on wines with a great many. There is something to be said for a producer that can make the expensive thing and the honest thing under the same roof, and put the same label on both.