Chapter 4.1.1

In its “basic” version, Bardolino has a bright ruby colour colore rubino brillante, and is delicately fruity, with notes of both sweet and sour cherries, strawberries and raspberries; it has a very easy-to-drink style.

In the wines from the three subzones - Montebaldo, La Rocca and Sommacampagna -, matured for at least a year and coming from vineyards with lower yields per hectare, Bardolino’s typical aromas take on more elegance: the wines’ colours remain pale, but the complexity of their bouquets becomes accentuated, assuming spicy tones of cinnamon, cloves or black pepper and notes of dried flowers and citrus fruits.

Chapter 4.1.2

As long ago as 1900 Giovanni Battista Perez provided a description of the characteristics of the wines from the three areas.

Those of the districts of Caprino and Bardolino were of “a pale red hue; appealing on the palate, and not heavy on the stomach” and had a capacity for maturation “because of the tannin they contain, and which it appears makes them long-lived”. In the “lower portion of the southern moraines”, on the other hand, “the wine has less colour”, an annotation that was not confirmed, however, in the evaluations carried out in 1939 by the Experimental Station for Viticulture and Oenology in Conegliano, for which the wine from the “Sona-Custoza” zone stood out as being “a bit deeper in colour and fuller in body”.

Chapter 4.1.3

A pale colour has always been one of the prerogatives of the best wines from the Bardolino area: as long ago as 1820, in his “Descrizione di Verona e della sua Provincia”, Giovanni Battista da Persico stated that “given that they would have, with age, the colour of wine from Burgundy, and if they were sold as such, they would be very successful in overcoming the widely-held prejudice that the goodness of a wine lies in its colour and not in its quality”.