2024 Omen Teroldego Lake County 750 ml

There are roughly 400 hectares of Teroldego planted on the planet. Almost all of them are in one place: A small, gravelly plain in the northeastern Italian region of Trentino, where the Adige and Noce rivers converge beneath the Dolomites. The grape has been grown there since at least the 15th century and almost nowhere else. It is, by any reasonable definition, one of the world’s great untraveled varieties.

Which is what makes the 2024 Omen Teroldego Lake County such a quietly striking thing to encounter in a glass.

Teroldego is a late-ripening variety that demands a long, warm, dry growing season to reach its potential. In the wrong place, it’s harsh and vegetal. In the right place—and Lake County, with its iron-rich volcanic soils, high-elevation vineyards, and wide diurnal swings, turns out to be a very right place—it delivers deep color, silky structure, and an aromatic profile all its own: black fruit layered with roses, lilac, and freshly cracked black pepper.

Lake County sits just north of Napa Valley, anchored by ancient Clear Lake and the dormant volcano Mt. Konocti, whose eruptions left behind a landscape unlike anything else on the North Coast. The soils here are obsidian-laced and iron-rich—young in geologic terms, intensely volcanic, and exceptionally well-drained. They stress the vine in productive ways, concentrating flavor while preserving the kind of natural acidity that keeps a wine alive in the glass.

The Omen project has long been in the business of finding underexplored sites and unexpected varieties and wringing something honest and delicious out of both. This Teroldego is a natural extension of that philosophy—small-batch, sustainably farmed, and made with the kind of minimal-intervention approach that lets the grape speak for itself rather than getting buried under winemaking artifice.

What ends up in the bottle is a wine that’s flamboyant in the best sense: rich and textured, full of stewed black fruit and floral lift, with the silky tannin structure that makes it as easy to enjoy on a Tuesday as on a Saturday. For anyone who’s tasted Teroldego in its Alpine homeland and wondered what it might do somewhere warmer, this is a rewarding answer.