Newsletter
April, 2010 – B is for ......
Name three Italian towns starting with the letter „B” after which well known wines are named?
I’ll list them at the bottom of this piece but I’ll help you out with one of them right away since I was there on a recent Spring weekend and enjoyed a couple of glasses of Bardolino with lunch.
Yes, Bardolino’s both a town and a generic wine grown on the hillsides around it. The town hugs the eastern shore of Lake Garda about 45 minutes drive north of Verona or a 40-minute voyage by boat from Sirmione on the finger of land which points upwards from the southern end of the lake.
Once you round the top of the Sirmione peninsula and its bleached white Roman ruins, the view is spectacular. Bardolino and the neighbouring town of Garda are distant smudges of pastel colour beneath the squat, 400 metre high Mt Luppia, itself dwarfed by cloud-harassed peaks stretching off into the Alps, the highest still blanketed with snow.
Sunlight flickers on the shore as the ferry draws closer and you can pick out the vineyards between the orange-tiled houses spread haphazardly about the slopes leading down to Bardolino on the water.
Like Sirmione, Bardolino’s main source of revenue these days seems to be tourism. There are literally dozens of bars and restaurants on the broad, well-kept waterfront itself and even more on the narrow, cobblestone and traffic-free streets leading away from the lake.
I find one that’s full somewhere in the centre of town and reckoning that the fact that its packed is a vote of confidence in the food, squeeze in between two couples already tucking in to pizzas and a platter of seafood. Since I know that Bardolino is a light, sparse and slightly acidic red I see it as a good choice for both pizza and the spaghetti vongole that my wife, who doesn’t like whites, has chosen.
I myself would have chosen a white from Lugana with the vongole. Made from the trebbiano grape they are soft, aromatic wines with good balancing acidity, much more interesting to me than Pinot Grigio, especially with seafood or as a summer aperitif. Lugana is at the southern end of the lake.
The Bardolino I chose did go well with the pizza and it seems, although perhaps she was just being nice to me, the spaghetti vongole. Its austere, sparse character cut through the cheese and smoked ham nicely and was light enough not to overpower the seafood.
Bardolino is made from the thin-skinned corvina grape which is also used to make Valpolicella, a wine from just a little further east from Bardolino. Both Bardolino and Valpolicella have always been pizza and pasta wines for me, the sparseness of both good foils for cheese on pizzas and in pasta dishes like penne carbonara.
But corvina is also the grape used in the region’s aristocratic wines, the sumptuous, full-bodied recioto or ripassos of which Amarone is the most famous. To get the plump, raisiny flavour of Amarone, the corvina grapes are dried first before being pressed. This concentrates the sugars and flavours and makes a wine so unlike either Bardolino or Valpollicella that you’d swear it was another grape entirely.
But if you make it to Bardolino it seems only fitting that you try the wine of the same name while you are there.
After all, you probably wouldn’t drink anything but Barolo or Barbaresco in the towns of Barolo or Barbaresco in Piedmont. Now that you have the answer to the question at the top, here’s another. Which grape or grapes are Barolo and Barbaresco made from?
Bardolino, the town
Newsletter archive
-
- » April
