What makes Soave Classico exceptional - and separate from Soave DOC?

In this short video, you'll join Austin Beeman and Suavia on the hills of Soave Classico to explore that question.

This is Episode #65 of Understanding Wine with Austin Beeman.

Transcript:

Two villages have Classico area inside their territory. One is Soave, so the main village, and is on this side, over here, and the other one is Monteforte and is on the other side of this hill. So our hills are right in the middle between the two districts.

And here you can see clearly what's the difference between Soave Classico and Soave D.O.C. Soave D.O.C is the flat area you see there. It's a huge area of production of white wines. It's the largest area of production of white wines in Italy, so it's very, very large. From the flat basically come all the wines that people sadly are accustomed to know as Soave, so a very cheap, low-quality, easy white wines. Very big quantities. Not very high quality. Here is another world.

This is our main territory, the basalt rocks. So these black stones that sometimes are really, really big, like masses, which we can find all around inside the soil and the color of the soil which is ... it goes from the black to gray to red, reddish. It full of minerals, so all these are characteristic like minerality and richness in element, go directly into the wine so the wines are very mineral, complex, and sometimes you have also kind of smokiness that comes directly from this kind of soil.

We grow Garganega in this way, which is particular way because yeah, I think the growing season you are more ... you see the most use of small vines, but here this method is a very ancient one, and it's called Pergola Veronese and you see that we let the vine to grow up until it is like two meters more or less, and then we leave the branches of Garganega to fall down on these iron threads.

And this is why we will follow the nature of Garganega plant because it is a plant with branches that tends to go downwards and not upwards.

Also, the berries of Garganega ... the skin of the berries is very delicate and so especially during the hot summers, it needs to have like umbrella, an umbrella to be covered.

And so in this way, all the leaves of the vine act as an umbrella on the branches, on the grapes, and so they don't get sunburned basically. So this is the most clever way to grow Garganega and it's also the historic one.

With the Trebbiano we use this system because the nature of the vine here is more to use the Guyot system. The branches of Trebbiano are very vigorous, so they tend to go upwards and not downwards so they don't need the iron threads to support the branches, and the skin of Trebbiano ... Trebbiano is a very strong variety and the skin is thicker than Garganega and so it doesn't need that umbrella that Garganega needs.