Recently, I had the chance to taste a soon-to-be released Soave wine with a retail price of more than $900 a bottle. It was poured from an unlabeled bottle in the tasting room of Inama winery by winemaker Matteo Inama. He and his father, Stefano, sat back—amid postersized maps of Soave Classico and displays of its famed volcanic soils—and awaited my reaction. We’d already tasted the new vintage of I Palchi, their current top-end wine, made from micro-parcels selected from 50-year-old vines grown in the volcanic soil of Foscarino, among Soave’s most famous crus. I Palchi, at over $60, is already one of the most expensive wines from the region. But this new “off-the-record” release was something else entirely. Matteo Inama told me they’d shown the wine to the sorts of collectors who buy premier cru Burgundy and Grosses Gewächs German Riesling, and those people were already preordering cases.
The Inamas insist this will be the wine that finally puts Soave on the international fine-wine map. It was certainly exquisite. However, after considering it for a moment, I asked, “But does it taste like Soave?”
“What is even the tradition of fine wine in Soave?” replied Matteo, with a chuckle. “We are like cavemen here.”
Stefano chimed in: “Can Soave be a top white like Burgundy or German Riesling? We didn’t know before. We didn’t have anyone running the marathon in front of us. We didn’t have any reference. But now we know.”
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Even as someone who is not in the market for a $900 wine, this ambitious Soave felt noteworthy to me. For years, I’ve been extolling the virtues of Soave Classico from a handful of top producers—such as Inama, Prà, Pieropan, Suavia and Gini. And most of it, even the best, is an amazing value, generally $25 to $40. But within the wine world, Soave carries a special sort of baggage that’s hard to overcome.
“Soave is still suffering a little bit from its past,” says Alessandra Tessari of Suavia. “But Soave is not the thing that people used to know. All of us are working to give a new image.”
Changing Channels
Bad reputations are hard to shake. It’s an almost immutable law of wine writing that you must recount Soave’s shady past when you write about it. For most of the 21st century, that story has gone like this: Soave was super popular in the 1970s and early 1980s as a cheap, not-very-complex white wine made by cooperatives who favored quantity over quality and was heavily advertised on television. At one time, it was among the best-selling Italian wines in the U.S. But by the end of the 20th century, as Boomers gained more wine knowledge, they shunned their old favorite—moving on to Pinot Grigio or other whites. Soave languished.
However, as the contemporary wine writer always dutifully points out: There are still great wines from Soave, and you should try them! This has pretty much been the Soave pitch for about 20 or even 30 years. I, too, am guilty of this hackneyed narrative. More than a decade ago, I wrote an article for The Washington Post, “Soave: Haunted by Its Pitiful Past,” in which I implored readers to “start a new relationship with Soave, which over the past few years has become one of Italy’s most interesting whites.” In 2024, wine professionals keep telling the same story.
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The problem with this narrative is that no one under the age of 50 remembers the Soave craze of the 1970s. And many of us who do were only children at the time. I certainly remember Soave Bolla TV commercials (much like I remember those “Riunite on Ice” spots from the golden age of wine ads on TV). I would have seen them when our babysitter let us stay up late to watch Love Boat or Fantasy Island. This was the same era when Orson Welles hawked Paul Masson (“We will sell no wine before its time”) and Blue Nun was sold as “the wine that’s correct with any dish.” Which is to say that this is ancient history. It would be just as relevant to reference Pliny the Elder’s (who died in the year 79 A.D.) opinion on the wines of Soave. Comparing good Soave to this bad Soave of old means nothing to a younger generation.
So, I propose we stop talking about Soave’s past. There’s no need to talk about the poor Soave of yore, since there’s plenty of middling, mass-produced Soave in the present. Almost half of the wine in the Soave DOC, for instance, is made by one massive cooperative with over 2,000 members. We need to stop talking generally about Soave in any macro sense and instead focus on the micro.
The New Crus
For starters, let’s focus on the Soave Classico subzone, the hilly heart of the appellation, around the towns of Soave and Monteforte d’Alpone. Soave Classico was first delineated in 1927 and vines have been planted there since the days of Pliny the Elder. Here, the soils are mostly volcanic, from basaltic lava to volcanic tuff to the so-called orizzonti rossi.
“We all talk about volcanic soil, but we don’t have just one type of volcanic soil,” says Claudio Gini, 14th generation of the Gini family making wine in Soave Classico. “There’s black and gray lava, basalt with iron that’s reddish, then what we have in La Frosca there’s yellow, with basalt mixed with sulfur.” In the alluvial plains of the wider Soave appellation, you don’t find this diversity of volcanic soil.
But the only way to tell such a story of terroir is the ability to name specifics on the label. Which is why the decision by the Consorzio Tutela Vini Soave in 2019 to establish 33 distinct zones, or Unità Geografica Aggiuntive (UGA), is so important. Finally, Soave producers can put meaningful local place names on the label. Soave, at long last, has something like a cru system. The hope is that consumers will become familiar with vineyard sites such as Foscarino, Carbonare, La Frosca, Monte Grande and Rugate.
Bottles from producers like these can evolve into something noteworthy and extraordinary. “People have many prejudices against Soave,” says Graziano Prà. “It’s very difficult to convince people that Soave can age. But a good single-vineyard bottling has the potential to age 10 to 15 years.”
The UGA system makes official what winemakers in Soave have identified for years. Pieropan (perhaps Soave’s most well-known producer in the U.S.) first labeled two sites in the 1970s, Calvarino in 1971 and La Rocca in 1978. “My father was doing this 40 years before the UGAs,” says Andrea Pieropan. In fact, they were the first white wine crus in all of Italy.
Just the First Step
Still, the UGA system is not a magic cure-all for Soave’s reputation. With the influence of the big cooperatives, more than a third of Soave’s land is marked as official UGA. “There are too many,” says Prà. “When there are too many crus, it’s too difficult for people to understand.” In Soave Classico, he says, the best crus are linked to producers. “Winemakers make famous crus famous,” Prà says. “Barolo has 177 crus, but most people only know five of them.”
While Prà’s position is understandable, one positive effect of the UGAs is to expand the idea of where good Soave comes from. I was blown away by the wines made by Dal Cero outside the Classico zone in Ronca Monte Calvarina UGA, grown at 600 meters altitude (about 300 meters higher than Soave Classico). Here, the Garganega reaches a crisper level of acidity that even Garganega in Classico often doesn’t reach. “There was a feeling that the only good Soave wines were in Classico, but that’s not the case,” says Francesca Dal Cero. “We were looking to Pieropan and Inama, trying to copy them. But after some years, we realized these were not our wines. We wanted to make wines that expressed our own area.”
Some producers in the Classico zone don’t like that Chardonnay has been allowed into the blends, alongside the traditional grapes, Garganega and Trebbiano di Soave. “It’s not that I have something against Chardonnay,” says Pieropan. “But how can you compare a wine with Garganega and one with Chardonnay? How is Chardonnay an expression of the territory?” The use of Chardonnay dates to the inferiority complex that Soave has carried since the late 20th century. “There was an idea in the 1980s and 1990s that if you wanted to play in the premier league, you needed to have international grapes,” says Pieropan. “But now, it’s the opposite. My father wanted to play in the premier league with Garganega.”
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There has also been some grumbling about the lack of aging requirements with the new UGAs. For a producer like Gini, whose bottles can age for decades, releasing a wine four months after harvest is unacceptable. “We need to wait one year before releasing the wines,” he says. “When it’s young, all Soave is similar and it’s difficult to tell the quality. The single vineyard should not just be for marketing. It should mean something.”
Matteo Inama and I walked through his Foscarino vineyard on a sunny September day, tasting grapes from the vines. “You’re starting to get that orange taste,” he said. “Foscarino grapes always taste like blood orange just before they’re ready to pick.” In a newer part of the vineyard, the taste was more like green apple. As we moved into the 50-year-old pergola vines, I could taste mandarin and pineapple. “We’re two weeks from harvest, I think,” Matteo said. “You can feel it already, it’s already more complex.”
As we popped almost-ripe grapes into our mouths, Matteo told me, “If you want to achieve wines with tension and complexity, you need the grapes to get you there. If you don’t prune properly, if you don’t farm properly, you might be making a Soave Classico, but you’re not really making a cru.”
The secret to restoring Soave’s reputation, it turns out, is not a secret at all. Like everything else in life, it will be a matter of hard work, harvest by harvest. “The cru system is just a first step,” Matteo said. “All of us, together we will all have to make the area better.”
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Wine Enthusiast magazine. Click here to subscribe today!
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Published: February 13, 2024
