Verdicchio

Verdicchio is the best white grape of the Italian Marche and one of the most underrated in the country. Its name comes from verde, green, after the faint greenish tinge in the skin and in the finished wine.

It makes a dry white of real structure: lemon, green apple and white peach with a pronounced note of bitter almond on the finish, firm acidity and enough body and phenolic weight to age for a decade or more. That bitter-almond signature is characteristic and is one of the more reliable ways to identify the variety blind.

Two zones matter. Castelli di Jesi, inland from Ancona, is the larger and produces everything from simple everyday wine to serious riserva bottlings. Matelica, higher and further inland in a valley running north to south rather than towards the sea, has a more continental climate, greater day-night temperature swing and produces tighter, more mineral, longer-lived wines in much smaller quantity.

For decades its reputation was hostage to packaging: the fish-shaped amphora bottle used by one large producer from the 1950s onwards sold enormously well and fixed the wine in people's minds as a cheap trattoria white. The serious producers abandoned the bottle long ago and the association has taken a generation to fade.

DNA work has shown Verdicchio to be the same variety as Trebbiano di Soave and Trebbiano di Lugana — meaning it is also responsible, under other names, for the whites of Soave and Lugana in the north, and is unrelated to the ordinary Trebbiano Toscano.