Bianco di Pitigliano DOC

The tufa country of southern Tuscany, where Pitigliano and Sorano stand on cliffs of volcanic rock riddled with caves. The denomination covers both communes entire plus parts of Scansano and Manciano, and its wine has been stored underground for as long as anyone has made it.

The Terroir The registered file is exact. The territory is hilly and foothill, with good rainfall and scarce summer rains; the soils sit on formations made up predominantly of effusive and volcanoclastic rocks, tufaceous, whose chemical and biological fertility is high. This is the northern edge of the Vulsini volcanic district — the same system that produced Lake Bolsena a few kilometres south — and the rock is soft enough to dig with hand tools and stable enough to stay dug.

Wine in the Rock The file makes the connection explicitly, twice. It is a historic wine zone, going back to the Etruscans, where the wines were kept in caves dug into the tuff; and the traditional production of sparkling wine, it adds, is linked to the presence in the zone of cellars naturally dug into the tuff, which allow optimal temperatures to be maintained. A constant cool cellar with no refrigeration, in a place with hot summers, is not a picturesque detail — it is the reason a white-wine culture survived here at all.

Grape Varieties The file separates them by era. The traditional group is Trebbiano, Greco, Grechetto and Malvasia Bianca Lunga; the modern additions are Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier, with Verdello, Ansonica, Riesling Italico and Pinot Bianco also permitted. The wine is straw-yellow, fine and delicate, dry and fresh, sometimes vivace. A spumante is registered.

The Critical Take Bianco di Pitigliano was a name people knew in the 1970s and forgot in the 1990s, when Tuscany decided its future was red. It deserves better. Volcanic tuff gives whites a smoky, saline lift that the Trebbiano-based blends of central Italy almost never have, and the good bottles here are firmer and longer than their price suggests. The problem is that the same growers can plant Sangiovese and sell it as Maremma for three times the money.

La Piccola Gerusalemme Pitigliano held a Jewish community from the sixteenth century, refugees from the Papal States who were tolerated under the Orsini and later the Medici, and the quarter cut into the tufa below the town — synagogue, ritual bath, bakery and cantina for kosher wine — is still there. The town has been called the Little Jerusalem ever since. Wine-making was part of that community’s life, in the same caves.

At the Table Maremman cooking: acquacotta, wild boar, sheep’s cheeses, tortelli, and fried lake fish. Serve at 10–12°C.

Benchmark Producers Sassotondo at Sorano and the Cantina di Pitigliano, the cooperative that carries the volume.