Soave Discovery Guide

Two reasons, and they are unrelated.

The first is the walls. Most Italian towns lost theirs to nineteenth-century expansion; Soave kept the entire circuit, built by the Scaligeri in 1369, climbing the hill to the castle and back down again with twenty-four towers still standing. You can walk sections of it, and the view of it from outside is the reason people stop.

The second is the wine. Soave was one of Italy's first DOCs and for a while one of its most abused names -- vast quantities of thin white shipped under it. The recovery came from the Soave Classico hills, where old Garganega on volcanic basalt makes something with real texture and a long life. Tasting on the hill, at a producer, is a different experience from the supermarket bottle.

The Castello Scaligero above the town is genuinely worth the climb, restored in the nineteenth century but standing on its own hill with the vineyards below.

If you travel slowly: two or three days -- the town in a morning, then the Classico hills, which need a car or a bicycle and reward being unhurried.

If you want the essentials: the castle, the walls, and Piazza Antenna. Two hours, plus a tasting.

If you're after local character: a producer's cellar on the hill rather than a tasting room in town. Most take visitors by appointment, and the difference in what you learn is considerable.

If you want to go past the obvious: walk or cycle up into the Classico zone above Soave and Monteforte d'Alpone. The old terraces, the black volcanic soil and the pergola-trained vines explain the wine better than any tasting note.

Soave is small -- around 7,000 people -- and the visitor pressure is concentrated in the historic centre and on a few weekends. Parking outside the walls and walking in is both easier and better for the town.

The Classico hills are the fragile part of the landscape. Terraced vineyards on volcanic slopes, some with vines a century old trained on the traditional pergola veronese, are expensive to farm and have been steadily replaced by flat-land planting where the machinery goes. Buying from a Classico producer is the most direct support the hillsides get.

Several producers here have moved to organic certification, and a number of the old pergolas survive because families chose to keep them.

Visiting mid-week rather than at weekends, and outside the September harvest when the roads and cellars are working, makes a real difference in a town this size.

May, June and September are the best months: warm, green, and with the vineyards at their most photogenic. September is harvest, which is atmospheric but busy.

Late September brings the town's medieval festival, when Soave is at its most crowded and most theatrical.

July and August are hot on this plain, and the town has little shade -- workable but not ideal.

Winter is quiet and often foggy. The walls in mist are memorable; the cellars are open and unhurried; but the hills are bare.

What a visitor actually spends in Soave