2018 Tiare Pinot Grigio Collio Italy 750 ml

“This is the wine that started it all,” our buddy Alex told us last week as he slid a bottle of the 2018 Tiare Pinot Grigio down the bar toward us. We were skeptical that an $18 Pinot Grigio would inspire one of America's leading Italian wine experts to found an importing company, but after a single pour we understood why:

Tiare’s 2018 is a new benchmark for Pinot Grigio, and an astounding window into one of Italy's most unique slivers of terroir, vinified with laser-like precision, miraculously bottled for under $20. We've already placed our own orders.

We stopped Alex from listing the winery's pile of Gambero Rosso accolades (including the Best Emerging Winery in Italy award) and secured the exclusive immediately. With concentrated notes of pineapple upside-down cake and Meyer lemon carried along by savory hints of green almond and coastal salinity, we immediately grabbed a 50-case allocation for Wine Access members. At $18.00—28% off SRP—it’s a must-have.

“Friuli is one of the most incredible areas in the world for white wine,” Alex said when he saw the shock on our faces after our first sip of this Pinot Grigio. “And Collio is a cru for us, the top-quality production area. The uniqueness of the combination of the sea and mountains, both compacted together like 35 or 40 miles away from each other, make these beautiful aromatic wines with driven minerality and salinity.”

The vines pull the same character from the limestone-rich soils as the great whites of Burgundy and Chablis do from theirs, but for a fraction of the price. 

Type Friuli into Google maps and zoom in on the top of Italy’s boot. Venice is to the west and Slovenia is east. In between is the single acre where Roberto Snidarcig grows his Pinot Grigio, a piece of land that millions of years ago was underneath the Adriatic Sea. When the water receded, calcium-rich shells of mussels and clams mixed with the indigenous clay and rock and formed the limestone-rich terroir that gives this Pinot Grigio its salinity and aromatic complexity. 

“When you have fruit that’s perfect, you don’t have to do much,” Alex told us after an inevitable second glass. “You just follow what nature gives you. It’s always easier. This wine, for someone who wants to learn, they should take as a scholastic Pinot Grigio to understand what true Pinot Grigio can be.”

This is the wine that Roberto, the owner and founder of Tiare, always wanted to produce. He grew up in this part of the country, speaking Italian with his mother and Slovenian with his father, all while learning the lessons of the land and its wines. Eventually he moved to South America, where he and his wife Sandra owned a restaurant.

But the pull of Friuli was too much to resist, and twelve years ago they came back with a single goal in mind: To make the best white wines the region has ever seen. They have achieved that goal in stunning fashion. The 2018 Pinot Grigio—which is almost entirely fermented in stainless steel—is a pure, delicious expression of the land they love, and that has been millions of years in the making.