Valentini

There may have been no more cult figure in Italian wine than the late Edoardo Valentini, the mysterious producer of Italy's greatest white, the legendary Valentini Trebbiano d'Abruzzo.

This extraordinary wine became legendary for the intensity, complexity and aging reported by those who were lucky enough to have tasted it. And the legend was only fueled by its extreme rarity and Valentini's reluctance to talk about how he did it. What is known is that he uprooted existing plantations of the characterless clone Trebbiano Toscano. He replaced it with an old local clone, Trebbiano d'Abruzzese, convinced that it better conveyed the soul of his terroir.

And he drew on venerable Roman winemaking methods to express this with startling clarity. Also, he didn't do it every year. And when he did, he only bottled 5% of his fruit, selling the rest for not meeting his perfectionist standards.

From father to son Edoardo passed away in 2006 after making this incredible wine for fifty vintages. But his son Francesco, schooled from a young age in his father's singular ways, hasn't missed a beat, creating epic Trebbianos since his first solo vintage in 2007.

In fact, they may be even better than before. Francesco has brought greater consistency and elegance to this deep wine, without sacrificing any of its transcendent character.

Whether made by Edoardo or Francesco, production from the Trebbiano has always been microscopic, making the wine almost impossible to obtain. However, its exclusivity is about to increase several times, due to a freak autumn blizzard in 2013 that destroyed many of the old Trebbiano d'Abruzzese vines that produce it.

The Price of Tradition Out of reverence for tradition, Edoardo trained his vines in the classic tendon system, with a tall canopy at right angles to the ground.

But the family paid for it in November 2013, when a freak storm dumped massive amounts of snow on the treetops while they still had leaves. On the best and most exposed sites, many of the vine trunks split in two. Francesco is almost as media-shy as his father, but he reported to the Italian press that "half of the vines were damaged, unfortunately in the best areas... precious vines that were at least half a century old."

While Francesco has not revealed how many vines were lost, the impact on his already small production is sure to be profound; with losses from the blizzard there will be even less wine, likely leading to higher prices and even greater shortages. Sublimity in red and pink With so much attention on extraordinary Trebbiano, it can be easy to overlook the fact that Valentini has also been making the best Montepulciano d'Abruzzo for just as long, as well as a transcendent Cerasuolo rosato, also from grapes from Montepulciano.