This Italian White Wine is Cheaper Here Than in The States

And it’s a great value in both places.

Umani Ronchi Verdicchio 2012 $20I love Verdicchio. I love its lyrical names, I love its tropical-but-edgy persona, and I have fond memories of my Dad ordering it whenever we went our for Italian. The problem with it is the problem that I, as a transplanted Albertan living in BC, have with almost all wine—the selection is brutal and the prices high. Verdicchio is a classic example of this—if you like the grape, here the BC Liquor store has precisely three options for you. On the low end, there’s the Fazi Battaglia (known by everyone as “the fish wine” due to the shape of its bottle), which is cheap and cheerful for $10.49. and on the high end, there’s one from Villa Bucci at a jaw-dropping $60 (even I don’t like Verdicchio that much). But like Goldilocks, the one in the middle—the $20 Umani Ronchi—that’s just right. It has a seawater salinity that counters the honey and tropical fruit notes and creates a wine with a solid wallop of minerality. And it has the beautiful golden yellow hue I associate with the grape. But perhaps my fave thing about the wine—when I look it up on American websites, it’s the same $20 (which is actually more given the exchange rate) that we pay up here and you know how rare a bird that is.