Soave Culture

Garganega is the centre of everything here. It is an old, late-ripening white grape, and the arguments in Soave -- hill against plain, pergola against wire, volume against concentration -- are all arguments about how to grow it.

Recioto di Soave is the town's oldest wine idea: grapes dried on racks through the winter and pressed sweet, the white counterpart of Valpolicella's Amarone tradition, and the first DOCG in the Soave family.

The pergola veronese -- vines trained overhead on a canopy -- is the traditional local system, and the surviving old pergolas on the hillside terraces are as much a cultural inheritance as the walls.

The food is Veronese: risotto, bollito with pearà, freshwater fish, and Monte Veronese cheese from the hills above. The pairing with Soave is a local orthodoxy that mostly holds.

The town's medieval festival in September fills the walls with a costumed re-enactment that is, unusually for the genre, tied to a real charter.