Candia dei Colli Apuani DOC

Vineyards on the seaward flank of the Apuan Alps, above Massa and Carrara, in sight of the marble quarries. It is one of the most difficult places to farm in Tuscany and one of the least like the rest of it.

The Terroir The registered file describes an extended territory with differing rainfall regimes and thermal excursions, and vineyards planted at over 4,000 vines per hectare on variable slopes, sometimes on terraces cut wide enough to admit machinery. The consolidation of these very steep slopes, it says, has been achieved for centuries through the construction of dry-stone walls with stones and grassed ciglioni. The zone covers the communes of Carrara, Massa and Montignoso, between marble mountains that rise to nearly two thousand metres and a coastline a few kilometres away.

The Growers Are Old The file includes a sentence almost no other does: the entrepreneurs are on average over 50 years of age. It is a startling thing to find in a legal document, and it is the honest state of the denomination. Terraces this steep cannot be mechanised, the plots are minute, the land is worth more as building ground, and the people farming it are not being replaced quickly.

Grape Varieties Vermentino carries the whites — this is the southern end of the Ligurian Vermentino belt, continuous with Colli di Luni over the border — with Albarola alongside. The reds run on Vermentino Nero, Bracciola Nera and Pollera Nera, all of them local. The file itself singles out two varieties as giving the wines their character and credits them with high freshness, softness and structure: Pollera Nera among the reds, and among the whites a local variety it records under a name confusingly shared with an unrelated grape of the Veneto hills.

The Critical Take Candia is a Ligurian wine that happens to be administratively Tuscan, and reading it as Tuscan is why it disappoints people. There is no Sangiovese worth discussing; what there is, is saline, sharp, low-alcohol white made on terraces above the sea, and a set of red varieties that exist nowhere else. The best bottles are very good and the quantities are trivial. Buy them where they are made, because they rarely travel.

Marble The Apuan Alps are white because they are metamorphosed limestone, quarried since Roman times and still worked above the vineyards. The mountains matter to the wine for a plainer reason than geology: they stop the northern weather and channel a sea breeze up the slopes every afternoon, which is what keeps a Mediterranean site this far north fresh.

At the Table The cooking of the Lunigiana and the coast: testaroli, anchovies, lardo di Colonnata cured in marble basins in the mountains above, chickpea torta, and fried fish. Whites at 9–11°C, reds at 14–15°C.

Benchmark Producers Aurelio Cima and Podere Scurtarola, two of the small number of estates keeping the terraces in work.