In general, it’s relatively easy for wine drinkers to wrap their heads around the idea that certain red wines improve with age. Offering restaurant-goers or wine shop patrons a 10- or 20-year-old bottle of Bordeaux, Barolo, or Burgundy might come with sticker shock, but the concept won’t be scoffed at.

Try to do the same with white wines, and you’re much less likely to get traction, especially if you go away from white Burgundy or Riesling, the two whites most often cited when talking about ageability. That’s unfortunate in the case of certain Italian white wines, which can often require a decade or more of aging before they evolve beyond the kind of bright, zippy bistro sippers we most often think of when we think about Italian whites.