130. Italian White Grapes for WSET Level 2 Students: Cortese, Garganega, Verdicchio, and Fiano

Wine Educate: Wine Lessons, Travel & WSET Study Prep

Host Joanne Close takes WSET Level 2 students on a virtual Italian road trip to study four essential white grapes: Cortese, Garganega, Verdi

Key takeaways

• Cortese from Gavi is characterized by high acidity and flavors of lemon, apple, and pear.
• Garganega in Suave can be produced using the appassimento method to create Recioto de Suave.

Main topics

• WSET Level 2 Study Prep
• Italian White Grape Varieties

Notable quotes

I'm going to be like Mrs. Frizzle... come on, everybody, get on the bus.

Conclusion

This episode serves as a sensory-driven study guide that uses regional

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hi, Wine Friend. If you have any questions for me about WSET classes, trips, or just need some advice on where to go next, send me an email, joanne at wineeducate.com, J-O-A-N-N-E. It's me, and I look forward to chatting with you. Speaker 1 (0:22) Hello and welcome to the Wine Educate podcast. I'm your host, Joanne Close. This is episode 130. We have been trucking along with the Italian grapes and I've done the major red ones and I was thinking, oh, I've got these white ones to do. So for level two, we have four white grapes that we focus on and... I find it can be a little tricky in class talking about these grapes because we just go over the styles and where they're from. And then there's not a whole lot else there to latch on to to help you guys remember these grapes. So I'm based here in New Orleans in the swamp, and we often don't get access to a lot of these different grapes, which makes it even more difficult to learn them, right? So I thought what I would do, and I'm kind of excited about this, I'm covering all four of them in one episode, but we're going to go on a little Italian road trip. And this is going to tie up our Italian series quite nicely. It's going to help you think about these grapes in context, like where they're from, what the landscape looks like, what food you would eat it with. And it'll help you for... your exam for recalling them. All right. So I can't get this image out of my head, so I'm just going to have to say it. If you guys remember that show, The Magic School Bus, and Mrs. Frizzle, she's like, come on, everybody, get on the bus. That's what I feel like. Only I'm going to have a Mercedes van because it's more comfortable. So come on and let's do our little Italian road trip. The grapes we're going to cover are Cortese, Garganega, Verdicchio, and Fiano. And we're going to cover, ooh, about 675 miles. So quite a bit of distance. We are going to start in Gavi. Gavi is a town in Piedmont. And the grape here is Cortese. So this is interesting. And I was actually here this summer. We went to the Ligurian Coast to enjoy the sea. And then we popped on up to Piedmont. It is not