Garganega

Garganega is the grape of Soave, and it is responsible for one of the more unjust reputations in Italian wine. Soave was enormously successful commercially in the 1970s and 1980s, the appellation boundaries were expanded onto the fertile valley floor, yields rose, and the name became a byword for dilute supermarket white.

The original zone — Soave Classico, on the volcanic hills around the villages of Soave and Monteforte d'Alpone — never stopped making serious wine, and Garganega there is a grape of real quality.

It is late-ripening and naturally high-yielding, which is the root of the problem: cropped generously it gives thin, neutral wine, and cropped hard it gives something with genuine depth. It is traditionally trained on the pergola veronese, which spreads the canopy and protects the fruit from sunburn.

The wine is medium-bodied with yellow apple, ripe pear, white peach and a marked note of bitter almond on the finish, over a mineral, faintly smoky character from the basalt soils. Acidity is moderate and the texture is gently waxy. It is not an assertive wine — the character emerges slowly — and the best examples age for a decade, developing honey, hazelnut and a distinctly saline depth.

It is also the grape of Recioto di Soave, the dried-grape sweet wine of the region, and of some Gambellara.

DNA has established it as identical to Sicily's Grecanico Dorato, a long-distance relationship that remains unexplained.