Robin Lee is enchanted by La Collina dei Ciliegi Prea Bianco Verona IGT 2021.
It is always pure joy to travel to the hinterlands of the Veneto, but this day was particularly special because it was the height of cherry season and the branches along the roadside were laden with tantalizing, sweet red fruit. As the name attests, La Collina dei Ciliegi, in the high plateau over Valpantena above Valpolicella, was once cherry territory.
A generation ago, grape growers in Valpolicella relied on cherries to supplement their income, especially in the poorer vintages, but the supply chains have broken down, and food production has been reorganized in favor of national supermarket chains. There is no longer any profit in fresh fruit. In Montecchio, however, right on the way between the wine villages of Negrar and Grezzana, the cherries are still profuse, and on this day, they were at their peak, simply irresistible and there for the taking. The old cherry growers, however, are the only ones eating them; no one else, it seems, is interested in delicious fresh cherries. A sweet, red-faced, cherry-shaped old man was eating cherries off his tree in a vast orchard bursting with ripe fruit. Leaning on his beat-up old truck with a blissed-out expression, he invited me to join him and to please take as many cherries as I wanted, but I didn’t have any kind of basket, and I had to be at my appointment five minutes down the road in the wine-producing
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
