Enoteca Bisson, Bisson, Cinque Terre, "Marea," Liguria, Italy, 2025

There is a trail above Riomaggiore — the southernmost of the five villages — that climbs steeply through terraced vineyards before the sea opens up below you in a way that stops conversation entirely. I walked it on a clear morning in early autumn, the kind of morning when the air still carries the salt of the previous night's wind and the vines are almost embarrassingly loaded with fruit. The dry-stone walls holding those terraces together are centuries old. The men who built them are long gone. What remains is this: a landscape so extreme, so vertical, so completely shaped by the marriage of rock and sea, that the wines it produces could only come from here and nowhere else. Enoteca Bisson's Marea is one of those wines. It is the Cinque Terre I have been chasing since that morning on the trail, bottled and shipped to your door.

Here is what most American wine drinkers do not know: the terraces are so steep, the yields so low, the labor so punishing that what does make it across the Atlantic lands almost exclusively in the hands of sommeliers who specialize in Italian coastal whites — the kind of people running wine programs at serious seafood-focused restaurants in San Francisco and New York who understand that brine and minerality in a glass are NOT an accident of winemaking but a direct expression of where the vines grow. Bisson, imported by Neal Rosenthal — one of the most trusted names in American wine importing — is the producer those sommeliers reach for first. The allocation is small. The wine does not linger.

Pierluigi Lugano founded Enoteca Bisson in 1978, starting as a trader in small lots of bulk Ligurian wine before becoming a merchant, then a grower, then the most passionate champion of indigenous Ligurian varieties working today. He is personally credited with rescuing near-extinct cultivars — Bianchetta Genovese and Çimixà — from disappearing entirely, and with creating Abissi, Liguria's first ocean-aged sparkling wine, whose bottles are submerged 60 meters beneath the sea off Sestri Levante and surface encrusted with barnacles, each one unique. Marea's grapes grow on south-facing terraces in the hamlet of Volastra, above Manarola within the commune of Riomaggiore, on soils of decomposed mica schist, sandstone shale, and marine sediment — thin, poor, and rocky in the way that forces a vine to reach rather than sprawl. The blend is Bosco-dominant, with Vermentino and Albarola — a core variety long grown throughout the Cinque Terre DOC — filling out the frame. There is no oak. The farming is sustainable, with minimal inputs and yields that would make a Burgundian grower wince. Neighbors like Possa and Walter De Battè / Prima Terra work the same terraces; this is a serious appellation when the right producer is in the glass.

The color is pale gold with silver-green highlights — luminous, almost weightless. On the nose: lemon zest and crushed wet slate arrive first, then white peach, sea spray and brine, heather, and a thread of wild herbs that ties it all together. The palate is brisk and focused, with acidity that cuts clean and a texture that is neither fat nor austere — it lands somewhere between tension and generosity, which is exactly where great coastal whites live. The finish carries crushed stone and citrus pith long after the wine has left the glass. Serve well chilled in an all-purpose stem. Over the course of a meal, the wine opens and softens; what begins as a tight, mineral-driven aperitif becomes something rounder and more expressive by the second course, the fruit pushing through as the wine warms. Drink it while it is young and vital — this is a wine for the table, not the cellar. Pair it with grilled branzino with capers and lemon, or, as I would, with a plate of trofie al pesto the way they make it in Genova, with extra green beans and potato. This is the bottle I open when I want to remember that the best wines in the world are not always the most famous ones.