Italian wines are a peculiar joy – and frustration – for wine writers. On the one hand, they are a marvel in today’s increasingly homogenized marketplace. Where Australia and California, at least at the large-scale commercial level, are hurtling toward ever larger productions of ever less-distinctive wines, Italy is a stronghold of wine individuality. You get grapes no one else grows, offered by producers even the folks in the next hilltop town haven’t heard of.

The downside is Italy’s mind-boggling complication of growers, grape varieties, and districts. Readers understandably would like to trot to their local bottle shop and actually find what’s being recommended to them. Italy’s explosive diversity and exuberant abundance preclude such easy availability except at the most mass-produced level, however.

Yet the best Italian wines are simply so good, so original, and so irreplaceable that writers such as myself have no choice. These wines have got to be recommended. You can get them, and you should. They’re worth the effort. The reward is that rarest of pleasures in today’s world: affordable originality.

HERE’S THE DEAL

LAGREIN ROSE 2004, ALOIS LAGEDER This just in, as they say – literally. We’re smack in the season of rose drinking and this is a newly arrived rose that you don’t want to miss.

The problem with most roses – the vast majority, really – is that they’re insipid. They’re pink and that’s about it. No wonder rose’s reputation is so negligible. The word is practically a synonym for banality.

The boom years for rose were the 1950s, when seemingly every wine was turned into a rose. This was lamented at length by the P. Morton Shand, an upper-crust English wine writer. “The informing – and often the only redeeming – virtue of roses is their welcoming freshness,” he wrote with the faintest (dare one say rose like?) of praise of the category in “A Book of French Wines” (1960). That conceded, Shand went on to say of rose that, “Although made from the greatest diversity of vines, on widely dissimilar soils and in considerably different climates, all, whether dryish, emphatically dry or as desiccated as old bones … evince the same monotonous absence of individuality.”

It’s a pity that Shand very likely never tasted a rose made from the rare lagrein grape of Italy’s northern Alto Adige region, in the foothills of the Alps on the border of Austria. Lagrein is a red grape unique to the region and thrives on the limestone soil of the zone.

Alois Lageder is one of the leading producers in the area, quite possibly the most adventurous and accomplished grower of all. His winery is ultramodern, his array of wines extensive and frequently changing as he strives to create ever more original expressions. Mr. Lageder’s lagrein rose is one such example.

This 2004 bottling, newly arrived on these shores, is one of the most original roses you will ever taste. Pale cherry in hue, it delivers a substantive mix of minerality, black cherry, and an attractive edge of bitterness. This is not your grandmother’s rose. It’s a rose meant for substantive food, up to and including something as demanding as a steak or an anchovy-infused Caesar salad. It’s original enough to have given even P. Morton Shand pause for thought – as well as inviting another sip or two. $13.95.

DOLCETTO D’ALBA “MONTE ARIBALDO VYD.” 2003, MARCHESI DI GRESY As mentioned in a previous column,2003 was an astoundingly hot vintage almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere, nowhere more so than in Europe.(You may recall the grim tally of heat-induced deaths in France that summer, approaching nearly 15,000, according to a French government report.)

The wines that emerged from such cool regions as Burgundy, Germany, and northern Italy are like nothing anyone can recall. And there’s no predicting the possibilities in advance. For example, I’ve had 2003 Burgundies that are flat, flabby, lackluster affairs. And I’ve had others that rank among the greatest Burgundies I’ve ever tasted. Northern Italy saw the same prolonged heat wave, with the same unpredictable results. The best wines from that region in 2003 are not necessarily “classic,” but they are memorable, such as this 2003 dolcetto d’Alba from the Piedmontese producer Marchesi di Gresy. It’s a superb example of just how distinctive and rewarding a successful 2003 can be when you land on a good one.

Typically, dolcetto is an easygoing red wine with few tannins and no significant longevity. It’s Piedmont’s everyday tipple, and in the progression of one of their heroic meals, dolcetto is invariably the first wine served. (The orchestration of wines in a Piedmontese meal begins with dolcetto, progresses to barbera, and reaches its crescendo with Barolo or Barbaresco, made entirely from nebbiolo.)

Knowing this, you can understand why an “important” dolcetto is almost a contradiction in terms. Yet this single-vineyard 2003 dolcetto from Marchesi di Gresy is so substantial, so, well, meaty, that it falls outside just about anybody’s experience – winegrowers included – of this variety. Yet it still somehow remains a member of the breed, however burly and big-shouldered.

Monte Aribaldo, by the way, is a 25-acre vineyard in the Barbaresco zone surrounding di Gresy’s aristocratic hilltop villa. Its elevated position is surely one explanation for why the grapes took the unusual warmth of the 2003 vintage in stride, achieving an unlikely balance.

Dolcetto d’Alba “Monte Aribaldo” 2003 from Marchesi di Gresy stays true to its breed by its sheer seductive drinkability. Big it surely is, yet still gentle and inviting. Like all good dolcettos, it goes down easy. This is a red wine to break out along with the barbecue, as it will take on anything your grill can deliver, from spicy sausages to a butterflied leg of lamb. The price is tasty: $14.95.