One of the most thrilling wines I tasted this year at Vinitaly wasn’t a thirty-year-old Sangiovese or a gorgeous Franciacorta rosé.

No, it was a wine that should retail for under $15 in the U.S.: a humble, fresh, bright and brilliant expression of Corvina by Tenuta Sant’Antonio (above, one of my favorite Valpolicella producers), vinified in a light, food-friendly quaffable style — the kind of wine you just can’t stop drinking.

Scaia is a dialectal term that appears in the western Veneto and in Lombardy. It denotes gravelly or pebbly, a reference to the diluvial subsoils commonly found in the ancient river valleys of the Valpolicella where this wine is grown and raised.

This wine POPPED!

I’ve been a fan of Tenuta Sant’Antonio since I first tasted the wines in New York back in the late 1990s.

The brothers who make the wines are farmers, children of farmers, and the wines they make stay true to the Valpolicella that I know and love.

Valpolicella is one of those appellations that’s been nearly eclipsed by commercialization. (Did you know that development in the township of Negrar, at the heart of Valpolicella, is so out of control that it has delivered a neologism to the Italian language, Negrarizzazione — Negrarization — meaning unbridled commercial development?)

So much of the Valpolicella and Amarone that floods the American market these days is over-extracted and over-laden with alcohol.

I’m so glad to see (and taste) that the Castagnedi brothers have stayed true to their roots and the great wines they’ve historically produced.

Thanks, again, to Master Sommelier Craig Collins for setting up our appointment at the winery’s Vinitaly stand.