** "Vermentino heights along the Italian coast | Wine critic" | Blog

** "Vermentino heights along the Italian coast | Wine critic"

I can't help but love Vermentino. Okay, so perhaps you don't necessarily have to love it. But if you, like me, prefer light to medium-bodied white wines that offer an attractive array of aromas, flavors and mineral textures that change with terroir and evolve over time, what's not to love here?

Need proof? If you ever find yourself on Italy's Ligurian coast near Genoa or near famous places like Cinque Terre or Portofino, order fried anchovies, calamari or a plate of spaghetti vongole with a good local Vermentino. You'll realize that paradise exists.

The Italian coast is the garden of Vermentino, especially Liguria and Sardinia, but alsoTuscany and many other places where the sea meets the sun. A lot of Vermentino is also grown on the coast of Southern France, including Corsica, and the varietal is gaining more vineyards in Australia and California. Nevertheless, my favorite habitat remains Liguria, where Vermentino is not just another grape tree in the portfolio, but a star.

I recently returned there to visit Cantine Lunae Bosoni, one of the most consistently highly rated Vermentino producers in the Wine Spectator blind tastings I attended in 2016. Vermentino grown at high elevations in Liguria has more concentration, says Diego Bosoni, who has helped his family expand their hillside vineyards.

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The Bozonis are the largest and most innovative winemaking family in the appellation of Colli di Luni, which stretches across the regional border of Liguria into Tuscany and around the famous white marble quarries of Carrara. Luni was once an important Roman port for the shipment of marble. The seashore has since retreated more than a mile from the ancient Roman site, and today the sandy, more than a mile wide coastal plain gives way to the foothills of the Alps, where the soils are stony with veins of schist. "It's like three pictures of the same territory," says Diego Bozoni, 44, who has taken a more active role in production from his still-active father, Paolo, now 77. "The sea has one character. Inside, at the foot of the hills next to the winery, it has its own character. And the hills have another character." "That's the beauty of Vermentino," he says.