Kurtatsch Pinot Grigio Alto Adige 2021

Nicholas Wines readers first started to gobble up white wines from the steep hillsides of the snow-capped Dolemite Mountains during the pandemic. One after another, they all seemed to be better than the last… Tiefenbrunner, Muri Gries, you name it. The Pinot Grigio pulled from this extreme region in the Northeast of Italy Wowwed readers, one after another. Why were these wines so popular? The answer is simple.

While most Pinot Grigio is grown at low elevations for tonnage and then machine harvested – a precious few are given the kind of vineyard care you might expect out of fine white Burgundy. That’s the situation in this precious corner of Alto Adige – because there’s no other choice.

Elevations are much higher and the slopes can be intense. Machine farming at Kurtatsch is simply not possible. Instead, the low yielding vines are harvested by hand – row by row. Like all great cool-climate wines, the vineyards here benefit from large temperature swings from day to night, which allow for ideal acidity and fruit maturity.

And while Kurtatsch Pinot Grigios always receive a bevy of 90+ scores – a super short 2020 vintage means that we haven’t had this gorgeous PG in our store since the 2019 vintage. Luckily, the 2021 has just arrived and it is excellent. Even better for Kurtatsch, the 2021 has already earned a 91-point score from James Suckling, meaning they’ve kept their 90+ point win streak going for another year.