In the Italy of the 1950s and ’60s, Trebbiano was not a grape from which anyone expected greatness. It was the useful white grape: productive, pale, neutral, and destined largely for inexpensive local wine. Abruzzo itself was known more for quantity than for bottles collectors would one day chase.

It was Edoardo Valentin who changed everything. He took took direct control of his family’s ancient Loreto Aprutino estate in the postwar years, just as Italy was rediscovering its wine culture. Writers such as Luigi Veronelli were looking beyond famous labels and industrial production for individual farmers who could show what Italy’s native grapes were truly capable of. In Valentini they found one of the era’s most compelling figures: secretive, uncompromising, and convinced that Abruzzo’s humble Trebbiano could produce a wine of extraordinary consequence.

The proof came slowly. Valentini rarely explained what he did, bottled only when he believed the harvest deserved his name, and sold much of the rest anonymously. But bottles began to circulate among Italy’s most serious tasters, and then the old bottles began to survive. A 1974 Trebbiano from Veronelli’s legendary cellar was eventually opened alongside historic wines from Giacosa, Rinaldi, and Gaja — and the magnificent wine was easily their equal. That may have been the real “aha” moment: not simply that Trebbiano could make good wine, but that it could produce one of Italy’s profound and longest-lived whites, or wines period.

Valentini’s Trebbiano is not great just by accident or good luck. Its greatness comes from a heritage local form of the grape, traditional pergola-trained vines, severe selection, fermentation and aging in ancient large barrels, and a family willing to bottle almost nothing rather than release something merely good.

Today we have the 2021 Trebbiano. It is one of the rare times that we’ve featured a wine in this newsletter that we don’t want you to drink this weekend. The wiser approach is to put it somewhere safe and forget about it. At five years old, it can show citrus, herbs, beeswax, salt, and immense coiled density, but history tells us it has barely begun.

Fortunately, there is also the 2024 Cerasuolo. This is not, of course, pale poolside rosé, but Abruzzo’s historic cherry-colored wine from Montepulciano: vivid, savory, herbal, and structured enough for the table. Valentini’s is the benchmark.

The Cerasuolo offers the rare pleasure of drinking Valentini today. The Trebbiano offers something more difficult: the chance to participate in the same experiment that astonished Veronelli’s generation decades ago.

Valentini, Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo, 2024 $119.99

Valentini, Trebbiano d’Abruzzo, 2021 $149.99