Each year Verona is turned into the world's capital of wine

Once a year the city of Verona is turned into an international metropolis as the city plays host to the world’s largest wine exhibition. Through this series of blogs, I’ll be taking a look at why Vinitaly is the place to be for Italian wine.

Verona & Vinitaly

Verona is a city with a special place in my heart, it was the place I called home for 10 years and its beauty reminds me of why I suffered the fog, the heat and the interminable trails of tourists for so long. On normal days Verona is a relatively calm city, its back streets have an air of tranquility and the place seems to bask in its majestic history, yet when Vinitaly hits town, the atmosphere changes. There’s an almost tangible energy, the streets are filled with the babble of languages from across the world and the back-street wine bars spew onto the pavement. The city takes on a different aspect as it relishes the attention it under the wine industry spotlight.

For me Vintialy isn’t just a chance to catch up with all the people I knew in the world of wine, chat about which markets have taken off for them, which wines are doing well and which are proving more challenging, it’s also a time to discover things I never knew existed in the world of wine. Many wine lovers study diligently, sticking their heads in text books and memorising the grape varieties and wine-making procedures used in each corner of the world (this is after all how you pass certain exams) but for me the wine world is truly fascinating because wherever you look you’re sure to find that there’s someone making wine in a way the textbook never even contemplated, from grapes that only a handful (figuratively speaking!) of people have even heard of.

Discovery

My first day at Vinitaly started with exactly one of those experiences. Exchanging wine chit-chat with a friend from Belgium, he told me of how his wife had developed a love for the Moscato Rosa from the Trentino region in the north of Italy. Not-knowing much about it, I decided it was a good place to start my quest of discovery and hot-footed it over to the Trentino pavilion.

Moscato Rosa

The grape Moscato Rosa takes its name from the Moscato family however the word “Rosa” which would normally refer to the rose colour, in fact denotes the rose aromas in the bouquet. The aromas are in face completely different from the Moscato we know in Moscato’d’Asti for example. The grape is a small production, only 7ha of Moscato Rosa vineyards are registered in the Trentino record books and 3 of these are owned by the producer Roberto Zeni (not the producer of Valpolicella and Bardolino wines) a winery  founded in 1882 in the village of San Michele All”Adige, just 15km North of Trento.

The wine-maker, visibly proud of his Moscato Rosa, explains to me that if this wine were an animal, it would be a cameleon. The aromas change and develop, rolling first one way and then the next : clear notes of roses and violets but also of something spicy such as cloves and cinnamon, yet something vegetal and green whispers in the background. It’s certainly very different from the sweet floral aromas of Moscato we’re used to from Piedmont. Part of the grapes are harvested between end September and  mid-October and are naturally high in sugar. The vineyards were planted over 20 years ago and have low yields (vines produce less as they age), much lower than the production regulations would oblige. After manual harvest, the grapes are laid in plastic cases for a brief period of 3 weeks whilst the rest of the grapes are left on the plant to mature until November. During fermentation grapes are added slowly to the vats to ensure that the sugar content does not overpower and kill the yeast. As they say, the patience is a virtue. The charm of this wine is that it is sweet but has the acidity to balance this out so as not to be boring or sickly giving it great versatility. The acidity is maintained as the wine is not put  through malo-lactic fermentation (where malo acid like you find in apples is turned into softer lactic acid, as you find in milk for example).

The colour of the wine was sweetly rosy, the acidity compensates for the sugar leaving it lush in the mouth rather than sticky, the rose aromas enchanting. It’s the sort of wine that inspires summer, bowls full of sweet strawberries as the sun sets on a hazy day… or, for something unexpected, that importer friend of mine says the match with blue cheese is amazing and after this discovery, I trust his judgement!

This is the English version of an article published in the wine section of the Dutch website Dolcevia.com