Soave summer: refreshing Italian wines

Inama Soave Classico, Veneto, Italy 2023 (£16.99, Majestic) The Veneto, that part of northeastern Italy that sits just down from the foothills of the Alps and encompasses such glorious historic cities as Venice, Padua, Vicenza and Verona, is a real powerhouse of Italian wine. Each vintage, the region churns out around 11.9m hectolitres of such famous vinous names as prosecco, pinot grigio, valpolicella, and soave – enough wine, as the Italian wine statistics compilers at italianwinecentral.com put it, to make it the seventh-largest wine-producing country in the world were the region ever to secede, as its independence movement would like it to, from the rest of Italy. There is a fair degree of snobbery among wine-lovers about much of this output – not least the Venetian lagoonfuls of very ordinary, bland white wine made from over-cropped vines on the region’s flatlands. But there is so much, soft, easy charm in the good Veneto stuff, such as Inama’s top-notch soave, with its gorgeously mouthfilling mix of peaches, pears, white flowers and almonds.
Ca’ dei Frati I Frati Lugana, Veneto, Italy 2023 (from £21.90, Noble Green Wines, Valvona & Crolla, Hennings Wine) Inama is one of a bunch of quality-conscious producers who have together raised the reputation of soave in recent years, proving that the volcanic soils in the terraced hillside vineyards around Verona are capable of producing world-beating fine wines when the temptation to push yields in the vineyard to the limit is resisted, and when sensitive winemaking is employed in the cellar. Other names to look out for include Gini and Pieropan, both of whom, like Inama, make some superbly individualistic and expressive single-vineyard bottlings. Something similar has happened in the much smaller, and lesser-known Lugana denominazione which straddles the border of Veneto and Lombardy around the decidedly scenic shores of Lake Garda. Among the producers raising the area’s tone is Ca’ dei Frati, which makes pristine dry white wines from the local turbiana grape variety, with the 2023 I Frati offering a stony coolness along with its fresh, ripe apricot and subtle leafy herbiness.
Extra Special Lugana Veneto, Italy 2022 (£11, Asda) Lugana’s wines are increasingly easy to come by in UK supermarkets, with Asda’s Extra Special bottling offering a particularly graceful example of the area’s combination of softly tropical fruit, springtime blossomy notes, and soft but zippy and tingly acidity. But this part of the world is full of genteel high summery whites – wines that are more about subtlety and easy food-matching versatility than big, bold statement fruit flavours or blistering bone-dry citrus refreshment, and which often come at very handy prices. Recent northeastern Italians of this genre I’d recommend for summer vegetable dishes such as broad bean risotto or staples such as pasta and pesto include the textbook soft stone fruit and whisper of honeyed almonds in Il Grifone d’Oro Soave Classico 2023 (£8.99, Waitrose) and the dangerously moreish 2023 vintage of The Wine Society’s own-label Pinot Grigio delle Venezie, £9.95, which is the kind of sprightly, thirst-quenching, fresh pear and apple-scented fridge-door white that the much-maligned pinot grigio does so well.
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