Cantina Di Soave

I had another day off of class on Wednesday and had signed up for a wine tour in Soave through our school. It was an early morning for me, especially after a full day in Bologna, but I was so excited to check out the winery since Soave is such a popular wine all over Italy and the world. There was about 12 of us from the program that signed up for the trip so we had a nice private tour of Cantina di Soave (Winery of Soave) it was one of the most popular ones in Soave – given there are tons in this town – and it was byfar the coolest winery I’ve been to thus far.

The old castle and its walls surrounded the city. The Scala family (the royal family of Verona) had this castle built here and most of it still stands today. Soave is very hilly, you can see from the pictures that the main castle was on the hill and behind it were the vineyards.  

My Italian teacher went along with us and was talking about the huge wine fest they have in May and September (May for wine, and September for the harvesting of grapes). The fountains are filled with Soave wine and free for anyone to drink… How cool is that?? We also checked out a bread shop that had hundreds of different types of fresh breads. I tried chocolate chip bread and raisin bread.

Once we go to Cantina di Soave, our tour guide came out and took us through the winery. It was just remodeled ten years ago, so everything was very modern and so colorful! We walked there where they store the wine in HUGE barrels. The barrels are about 70 years old, and still used in the wine process.

We continued to the downstairs of the winery and saw where the wine was stored in the smaller barrels, which were placed in side-by-side down two extremely long hallways. Basically, they make a lot of wine. The only downside was our tour guide only spoke Italian, so it was difficult to understand all the history of Soave. We walked through the rest of the winery before going upstairs and the walls were covered in old photos, all the way back to the 1800’s.  The top of the hallway was lined with wood panels from the old barrels used over 100 years ago.

We made it up to the a private wine tasting, it was set up so beautifully. We tried three of the Rocca Sveva wines. The first was Soave Classico Castelcerino, it was a nice simple white wine that we had with potato chips. The second wine (my favorite) was Valpolicella Ripasso, a red wine that we had with crackers. The third wine was a dessert wine and was extremely sweet. It was called Recioto di Soave. Basically it tasted like apple juice with a touch of alcohol. Not too bad but I don’t think I could handle more than a glass. Afterwards we had time to shop around and I picked up a bottle of Ripasso to save for my mom and I when she visits in April!

Soave is no Tuscany, but it was such a beautiful town with so much history and lots of wine (always a plus). We lucked out and the rain held off until our bus ride back to Verona.