Madly under-rated whites from Soave

M&S Lo Scudo, Soave Classico, Italy 2024 (£8, Marks & Spencer)

Some wine regions (Bordeaux, Napa) get on a wine list because they’re classics; others (Provence, Greece) because they’re the current or next big thing. Then there are the puzzlingly ubiquitous wines that seem to have few passionate supporters, and which apparently sell just enough to keep them ticking by. The northeastern Italian wine region of Soave might seem to be the perfect example. I’ve never met anyone outside the Veneto who would rank it as their favourite wine and never known it to be trendy in the UK. And yet every supermarket has at least one, so it must be doing something right – that something being, in the case of M&S’s Lo Scudo, an unobtrusive, easy-drinking, light-food-friendly dry white at a very good price.

Cantina di Monteforte Coste, Soave Classico, Italy 2024 (£9.50, The Wine Society)

There’s no doubt that the resilience of soave in the UK owes much to its useful ability to offer unfussy drinkability at a discount, and Morrisons' Soave is one of very few wines to offer more than sugary acid at a scarcely believable £4.65. It’s a wine I’d happily quaff nice and cold on a hot day with a plate of spaghetti alle vongole, provided I was able to leave aside the troubling question of how sustainable such prices are for the producer. I’m aware the garganega grape variety in Soave is capable of making good wines at higher yields than others manage. But I also know that lower yields from vines grown in the region’s best sites can make for slightly pricier wines full of charm that also offer their makers a better return – wines, such as the graceful, plumply stone-fruited Coste.

Inama Soave Classico, Italy 2024 (£15, Majestic, in a mixed case of six)

You really don’t have to spend very much to get access to some genuinely fine wines in Soave – wines that are every bit as good and distinctive as you can find anywhere in the wine world. The best producers, often working from grapes grown in one of 33 different named zones (or UGAs) classified by the local wine authorities at the end of the 2010s, make wines that age brilliantly, and which are as far from the workaday sub-£5 bottlings as the top crus of Burgundy are from your basic supermarket bourgogne blanc. Among my favourite producers are Coffele, Gini, Pieropan and Inama, with Inama’s flagship Soave Classico, a gently mouthfilling mix of greengage juiciness, spring blossom, fennel and subtle nougat-like sweet nuttiness, being the perfect place to begin to understand why Soave deserves a place in the limelight.