Ponte Pietra Merlot Corvina 2025
£8.75
The wine
A delicious blend in which the soft blackberry of the Merlot melds with Corvina characteristic cherry.
Corvina is the backbone of Valpolicella and gives the region its sour-cherry signature, while Merlot has been grown in the Veneto since the nineteenth century and is thoroughly at home. The Veneto is the largest producer of DOC wine in Italy, and blends like these sit outside the named appellations deliberately, which lets a grower pair varieties the rules would not permit. Ponte Pietra takes its name from the Roman bridge at Verona, and the wines come from vineyards beside the Soave zone in the Veneto.
The producer
Ponte Pietra
View all Ponte Pietra winesMatt Thomson of Blank Canvas makes the Ponte Pietra wines at the Cantina di Monteforte. The name refers to Verona's Ponte Pietra, the stone bridge across the Adige that dates to Roman times, though vines had thrived on the hills outside the city long before it was built.
Monteforte d'Alpone sits in the heart of the Soave Classico zone, on hills of volcanic basalt and limestone that are the reason Soave from here tastes of something. The grape is Garganega, a late-ripening variety with naturally high acidity and a faint almond bitterness on the finish, and its reputation suffered badly during the decades when Soave meant industrial white wine from the flat land beyond the classico boundary. Growers on the hills have spent thirty years recovering the name.
The Cantina is a large co-operative with several hundred members, which sounds like a disadvantage and is not: it gives access to old parcels on the best slopes that no single estate could assemble. Thomson's hand shows in the handling, with the fruit pressed gently, chilled fast and given time on fine lees for texture, and no oak to obscure a variety whose whole appeal is clarity.
