Most of you have probably never heard of Timorasso – yet in Italy it’s the most popular white wine grape at the top restaurants. And it was almost lost to history.
Italian winemakers would often plant many grapes in a single vineyard and sell the wine as a blend. At some point, for some reason, no one had any Timorasso vines left for sale and they were dying out.
An innovative winemaker named Walter Massa did a DNA analysis and identified Timorasso vines and started planting entire vineyards with it.
To my knowledge we are the only restaurant in Orange County that has Timorasso on the wine list. It is now the most popular white wine that we sell by the bottle.
The lesson is that sometimes in business, you have something that is working but don’t even know. The challenge is finding it.