Terre Bianche

Filippo was first enlisted in his father’s “almost crazy” quest when he was five years old—pasting labels onto bottles with homemade glue. The zesty white Vermentino and Pigato, along with a svelte Rossese di Dolceacqua, were true family affairs. Paolo’s brother-in-law Franco Laconi joined the Rondelli men out on the stone-walled, sun-blasted terraces. “And the vintage year was often written by us children, in pen,” Filippo remembers. “The result was hilarious: crooked labels bearing almost illegible vintages. When I think back on it, I still get emotional.”

Claudio died tragically young, before his 50th birthday. Filippo was just 19, a university student whose prowess in physics and mathematics was part of a boundless intellectual appetite. Music, literature, philosophy, film, comics, linguistics: his interests could have launched him in almost any direction. But instead he came back to continue his father’s work. If there’s one thing that Dolceacqua’s peculiar geography rewards in a winemaker, it is a curious and flexible mind. 

Terre Bianche overlooks the Mediterranean Sea down a chute in the Ligurian Alps, which enclose the Val Nervia on three sides. “In just over 20 kilometers, you go from sea level to 2,000 meters of altitude,” Filippo marvels. The result is unique in the Mediterranean basin: climate bands that go from coastal to continental to sub-alpine within a hair’s breadth of latitude. An offshore wind that blows garrigue scents through olive groves soon ruffles the needles of Aleppo pines as it wafts up into chestnut stands and tall conifers. Isolated vineyards cling to rocky clearings in the maquis and forest. In terms of grape expressions, it’s as though you pinched a map of Italy to scootch Sicily right up against Alto Adige. “The wines of Dolceacqua combine some of the exuberant characteristics of the Mediterranean, like salinity and a sweet balsamic note,” says Filippo, “with the more austere elements of continental wine, like high acidity and citrus fruit.”

That citrus-zest tang is unmistakable in Terre Bianche’s Vermentino and Pigato (the latter being a close genetic cousin of the former that is unique to this region). Manually harvested from multiple vineyards—whose soils encompass blue marl, red and white clay, sandstone, and flysch—and aged on fine lees after soft pressing, both whites feature supple mid-palates and herbal aromatics that unfurl with time in the glass: the Vermentino tending toward flowers, the Pigato toward honey. These are fresh wines but also amply layered ones, and reflect a philosophy that Filippo credits to his father. 

“What he passed on to me, above all, was a non-dogmatic approach: an openness to any kind of knowledge, whether it be modern or deriving from so-called ‘tradition.’” That attitude has helped Filippo confront the challenges of a changing climate, which range here from drought to accelerated ripening, while maintaining the confidence to resist fads that might overwhelm the qualities that set Ligurian wine apart. All his experiments—with rootstocks, pruning styles, vine density—aim to express this unusual terroir with maximal transparency.

That vision shines very clearly in his Rossese di Dolceacqua, a red wine that was nearly doomed to extinction by the 20^th-century shift to mechanized agriculture and mass production—only to then face a generation-long obsession with everything this varietal is not: brash, Brix-besotted and oaky. What it is can be hard to convey on a standard shelf-talker. Though it has occasionally been championed for having a potential on par with Barolo and Barbaresco, the difficulty of cultivation and tiny production volume have fated it to relative obscurity. Light-bodied and vibrant, Terre Bianche’s benchmark bottling is easy to drink but harbors a deceptive sophistication. There’s high-toned red fruit, but framed by a marine salinity that melds with an herbal dimension to produce a savory wine whose floral opening leads to a subtly bitter finish. If the first sip suggests a lighthearted quaff, the second springs a trapdoor of nonconforming complexity. The varietal is known as Tibouren in nearby Provence, where it’s often used to make rosé, but when grown successfully on the Ligurian side of the border it really has no point of comparison beyond this slim and rugged corridor. 

Filippo has been blessed with hardy vines that average 30 years old and reach 100 in places. That legacy, he says, lends itself to a “continuous search for a broad, distant point of view that allows us to think in terms of very long time periods—and therefore outside the fashions of the moment. 

More than once I have found myself finishing projects undertaken by those who preceded me decades before,” he adds. “I believe that the greatest challenge every man faces—and thus the challenge that shapes all his projects—is to be able to remain himself within a constantly evolving world, without being a flag that flutters to the right or left at the first blow of the wind.  

“It is certainly not easy,” he concedes. “But maintaining a coherent and aware vision—that, I believe, is the most important challenge in times of great change.”