Bardolino & Lake Garda

Soave left us on the volcanic hills east of Verona, making the case that this region's whites deserve to be taken seriously. Now cross to the other side of the city — west, to where the vines run down to the shore of Lake Garda — and change the whole register. These are the holiday wines: light, sunny, unbothered, poured on terraces with the water in view. Don't mistake easy for unserious, though. There's a sleeper white out here that ranks with anything in the region.

Corvina goes to the beach

Here's the neat trick of Lake Garda: the same grape that gets dried into brooding Amarone up in the hills makes a featherweight summer red down on the shore. Bardolino, on Garda's southeastern bank, is Corvina and Rondinella again — but grown in the lake's warm, breezy microclimate and made deliberately light. Pale ruby, sour cherry and red berry, barely any tannin, a fresh acid lift. Serve it with a slight chill and it's the ideal lunch red: it asks nothing of you and gives back an afternoon.

That's the point of Bardolino, and it's a virtue, not a limitation. Not every wine needs to be a monument. There's a Bardolino Superiore (DOCG) for a touch more structure, and the zone has lately mapped out hillside subzones for growers pushing the wine somewhere more ambitious — but the soul of Bardolino is the easy, chillable, drink-it-now version.

The pink one the locals actually drink

Ask what people on Garda pour when the sun's out and the honest answer is often Chiaretto — the pale, delicate Bardolino rosé, made from the same red grapes with a whisper of skin contact. Cherry, wild strawberry, a citrus snap; bone dry; sometimes lightly sparkling. It's one of Italy's classic rosés and it predates the modern pink-wine craze by a long way.

Chiaretto is the wine to order at a lakeside trattoria without a second thought. Cold, in a big glass, with fried lake fish. It's the taste of a Garda summer, and it costs next to nothing.

On Lake Garda the wines stop trying to impress you and simply keep you company. It's the most underrated skill in the whole region.

Lugana: the sleeper

Now the wine worth crossing to the lake for. At Garda's southern tip, on flat clay land that straddles the Veneto–Lombardy border, Lugana is made from Turbiana — a grape long muddled with Trebbiano and now understood as a relative of Verdicchio. And it is good. Young Lugana is crisp, citrusy, easy; but the best examples are something else — textured, saline, faintly flinty, and genuinely ageworthy, gaining honey and nut over five years or more.

This is the insider's bottle of the western shore. It flies under the radar because "Lake Garda white" sounds like holiday filler, and instead it delivers one of northern Italy's most serious values. If you take one thing from this part: when you see Lugana on a list, order it.

Rounding out the lakeside table is Custoza (Bianco di Custoza), a soft, floral white blend from the low hills back toward Verona — the region's amiable house white, made for the terrace rather than the cellar.

How to drink the shore

Treat Garda as the region's exhale. After the intensity of Amarone and the mineral seriousness of Soave, the lake is where you come to lighten up. Fold it into a Garda holiday rather than chasing it for its own sake: swim, eat lake fish, and let the wine be the easy part.

Practically, the western shore is the least "wine-touristed" corner of Veneto — the draw here is the lake first, the vineyards second, which keeps everything relaxed. Base near Bardolino, Peschiera or Lazise, and you can taste Bardolino, Chiaretto and Lugana within a short drive, no appointments-culture stress. The Veneto destination guide has the wider lay of the land; for how to string it together without a car, see visiting without a car.

We've now covered the whole spread above and around Verona — the dried-grape reds, the sweet wines, the volcanic whites, the easy lake wines. One region remains, and it's a world apart: north of Venice, the land folds into near-vertical hills so steep the work is done by hand, and the wine they make there is the most famous Italian export of them all. It fizzes. That's Prosecco, done properly, and Part 7 climbs into the hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene.