The Alps Have Been Winning
This Argument Since 1893.

Dear Artisans,

Almost all white wine is built to be drunk before the next vintage shows up.

Terlano makes the other kind.

The winery was founded in 1893 by a group of growers in the South Tyrol, high in the Italian Alps, and it is still a cooperative today — 143 families farming 190 hectares. They have been our house pick for whites for years, and our customers' pick for weddings, which is a harder test.

The reason these wines last is in the ground. The bedrock under Terlano is quartz porphyry, volcanic in origin, and the soils above it run 55 to 60 percent quartz with almost no calcium carbonate. Water drains straight through. Nutrients are scarce. Yields limit themselves without anyone having to intervene, and the vines respond to that mild, constant stress by producing their own terroir-specific polyphenols. What comes out of the press is salty, tense, and deep, and it does not fall apart with age. Terlano still opens bottles from the 1950s that taste like they have decades to go.

You will not find a thin white here. You will find balance, layers, minerality, and an insistent freshness — at prices that are a fraction of what equivalent quality costs from regions with better publicists.

Which brings me to the Vorberg. Last year James Suckling gave the 2021 Vorberg Riserva 99 points and named it the #4 wine in his Top 100 Wines of Italy. A Pinot Bianco. Fourth, in the country that also makes Barolo, Brunello, and Amarone.

The 2022 follows it, and it is a different creature — a warm, dry year, caught by those steep Vorberg slopes and turned into something rounder and more open early. Decanter gave it 96. Wine Advocate called it "a beautiful and more accessible taste of the best of Alto Adige." You can drink this one now. You can also put it away for ten years and be very glad you did.

Terlano Pinot Bianco 2024

This is the wine we hand people who tell us they do not like Italian whites. Apple and pear over raspberry and lime, a touch of camomile and lemongrass, then quince and a salty mineral snap that keeps going after you have swallowed. 2024 was the wettest spring in the South Tyrol since 1965 and Pinot Bianco was among the varieties hit hardest — yields down as much as forty percent. Small crops concentrate. You can taste it.

Terlano Cuvee Terlaner 2024

This blend was one of the wines Terlano made in its founding year, and they have not stopped since. Pinot Bianco supplies the frame and the acid, Chardonnay the warmth, Sauvignon the top note. Eighty percent rests in stainless, twenty percent on fine lees in large oak, blended a month before bottling. Green apple, white peach, lemon balm, mint. Then a long, mineral, faintly spicy close. Wine Enthusiast has it drinking well through 2045 — which for a wine at this price is close to absurd.

Terlano Vorberg Riserva 2022

Vorberg is a south-facing slope on the Monzoccolo above Terlano, steep and sunny, planted between 450 and 650 metres. The grapes are picked and sorted by hand, pressed as whole clusters, fermented slowly in 70 and 30 hectolitre oak casks, then left on the lees for a year. The result is honeydew, white peach, quince jelly and camomile against a hard mineral spine of flint, with a creamy weight that somehow never blunts the salt. Cellar master Rudi Kofler calls it the full potential of the grape. He is not overselling.

Start with one bottle.
Nobody ever does.

Every year we send this note, and every year the same thing happens: someone tries the Pinot Bianco because it is the cheapest thing in the email — and three weeks later they are asking us to hold them a case of Vorberg. Take all three if you want the whole picture, from the everyday bottle to the one you forget in the cellar for a decade. Everything arrives this Wednesday, August 5th.

Cheers,

— James Tran

Arriving Wednesday, August 5th · call 650-917-8080, text 650-880-3553, or chat with us