One of the oddities of wine (and there are many to choose from) is the strange contradiction of Italian wines in the American market. We Americans love Italian wine. We buy more of it than any other imported wine. Despite major inroads from the Aussies, this shows no sign of abating.

Yet at the same time, it’s fair to submit that most American wine lovers are baffled by Italian wines. All those names. All those vowels. To the Anglophone ear, they all sound alike. (When my wife and I were living in Piedmont, we treated my sister-in-law to a dinner-long siege of barbera, barbaresco, and barolo. The next morning she announced how much she liked the previous night’s wines. “Which one?” I asked. “The barberolo,” she replied.)

I would like to say that there’s a way out of the Italian wine thicket. But there’s not. Like a Dobos torte, Italy is too rich to ever be simple. You’ve got to take it on, layer by delicious layer, accepting the fact that the only way out is, paradoxically, to dive in.

HERE’S THE BUON AFFARE

SOAVE CLASSICO 2004, PRA One of Italy’s most debased wines is world-famous soave. For centuries, soave was a strictly local white wine from the eponymous town that was sluiced into nearby Verona. It is made from a local grape called garganega. (This variety is often mispronounced, by the way: It’s gahr-gahn-eh-gah.)

After World War II, tourists to Italy – especially Americans and Brits – decided that they liked the light, crisp dry white wine called soave. Probably, they also liked saying it, too. To order soave seemed, well, molto soave – very suave.(We now have the same phenomenon with pinot grigio, perfectly captured in a New Yorker cartoon where a fellow at a restaurant table says to his dining companion, “I want chardonnay but I like saying pinot grigio.”)

From this emerged a massive local wine industry. And that, in turn, transformed soave from a delicious white with a whiff of almonds and minerals to a bland and dreary wine with an inviting name and little else. It’s now issued in industrial quantities, upward of 5 million cases a year. Vineyards have expanded from the desirable hillsides surrounding the town of soave to the flat Po Valley floor, where high yields rule.

When grown with low yields, garganega delivers a delectable dry white wine with a chablis-like minerality or stoniness. The problem is finding such low-yield, hillside grown soaves. Added to that is the challenge of finding a soave that hasn’t also had a substantial (legal) addition of trebbiano – or the use of small French oak barrels to add, well, you know what oak does to a white wine.

For this taster, the best soave is the purest version: low yields, hillside-grown grapes, no oak, and no trebbiano. This is precisely what you get from brothers Sergio and Graziano Pra in their benchmark Soave Classico 2004. Made 100% from low-yielding, hillside-grown garganega, it is fermented and aged in stainless steel. It’s purissimo.

This is soave as it should be: dense, thick-textured, and practically exploding with scents of minerals, lemon zest, lemon curd, and crystallized ginger. It’s a stunning white wine, the sort that can make a Burgundy snob genuflect. The price is unbeatable: $12.95 a bottle.

CASTELLO DI BOSSI CHIANTI CLASSICO 2001 If soave wins the prize as Italy’s most famous white wine (category: debased) then chianti surely captures the same questionable prize for Italian reds. Is there any wine drinker who hasn’t heard of chianti? And is there any chianti drinker who hasn’t been disappointed?

The problem was – and still is, although less so today – one of an ancient complacency coupled with lack of economic incentive. Only in the 1970s did the chianti zone, especially the heart of it called chianti classico, start to revive after a century or more of decrepitude. The revival came mostly from the outside, from rich Milanese businessmen and Swiss, German, and British investors who couldn’t resist that captivating Tuscan countryside. They brought with them not just capital but ambition.

Today, the best wines of chianti classico are singular achievements. Castello di Bossi is one such. Located in the commune of Castelnuovo Berardenga (the same neighborhood as Fattoria di Felsina, a much-admired Chianti producer), Castello di Bossi dates back to the ninth century, which is old even by Tuscan standards.

From a wine perspective, it was recalled to life in the 1980s after being purchased by the Bacci family. They poured buckets of money into this 1,600-acre estate (306 acres of which are vineyards).Today Castello di Bossi is issuing impressive wines, none more so than this exceptional 2001 chianti classico bottling.

Composed mostly of sangiovese (90%) with a little merlot (7%) and a local grape descriptively called colorino (3%) this is a chianti classico that shows the best of what modernity and money can do in Tuscany today.

Dark-hued and strikingly dense, this is not a flashy wine. Quite the opposite. It’s what a really good sangiovese should be: slightly dusty in scent and taste, furnished with real mid-palate density and luscious yet constrained fruit, it fairly begs for food ranging from salami to a saddle of lamb. It’s as austere, detailed, and tailored as an Armani. This is great chianti classico from a standout vintage. Happily the price is more than giusto: $20 to $23. Look for a price as low as $17.95 (at Sherry-Lehmann, 679 Madison Ave. between 61st and 62nd streets, 212-838-7500).