There’s an old adage in the wine business: You have to spend a large fortune to make a small fortune. If all it took was tasty wine to win the game, there’d be a lot more success stories. Sommeliers and wine snobs like to hate on big, recognizable brands, as though they’re the wine equivalent of McDonalds. But that’s not fair! Most big companies start out as small companies. They make a quality product, find a way to stand out, build a team, and then take over the world. A hundred years ago the land where this wine from La Scolca is sourced was a sea of red grapevines and the whites there were mostly cheap table wines for local consumption. The Soldati family, the visionaries (or crazy people) who decided to buck tradition and build a brand on white wines from the Cortese grape started off by bottling just a handful of barrels of a single wine. Today, La Scolca is one of the most recognizable brands in Gavi. They make hundreds of thousands of barrels of 20 different wines, all white, rosé, and sparkling. And they’re still family-owned… and delish… and rich!