Bonarda dell’Oltrepò Pavese DOC

The everyday red of the Oltrepò Pavese, made in enormous quantity and drunk almost entirely within Lombardy. It carries one of the most misleading names in Italian wine: there is no Bonarda grape in it. The registered file confirms the wine was elevated to autonomous DOC in 2010, having previously been a style within the Oltrepò Pavese DOC.

The Name Problem “Bonarda” here means Croatina, and has done for well over a century. Elsewhere the word means something else entirely: Bonarda Piemontese is a genuinely distinct variety grown in small quantity around Turin, and Bonarda Novarese is in fact Uva Rara. Three grapes, one name, all within north-west Italy. Argentina compounds it further, where “Bonarda” is Douce Noire from Savoie. If you are drinking Bonarda in Lombardy or Emilia, you are drinking Croatina.

The Terroir The file gives the description shared by the Oltrepò denominations: hill country with a dry winter climate, ventilated in summer, and large temperature swings, which it says make the area suited to growing grapes and making wine, worked with traditional training systems, planting densities and pruning. It then singles out the grape: Croatina, evenly distributed across the whole territory, is its symbol, capable of both good lively wines and serious important ones. The ground is calcareous clay and marl on Apennine foothills south of the Po.

Grape Varieties Croatina is the base, with Barbera, Uva Rara and Vespolina permitted alongside. Croatina gives deep colour, blackberry and soft tannin but very little acidity; Barbera supplies exactly what it lacks. The wine is made dry, off-dry and sweet, still or — most characteristically — frizzante, with a foam the file describes as evanescent.

The Critical Take This is honest, cheap, unpretentious wine and it should not be judged as anything else. The frizzante version, purple and faintly bitter with a mousse that dies in the glass, is what Pavia and Milan drink with salami at lunch, and it is very good at that job. The still versions from the better Croatina sites — Rovescala above all, which has the oldest vines — are more serious than the category’s reputation suggests. Volume is the problem: the Oltrepò makes far more Bonarda than the name can carry.

Rovescala The commune of Rovescala, on the eastern edge of the zone, is the accepted heartland of Croatina and holds some of the oldest vineyards in Lombardy. Growers there treat it as a cru in everything but law, and its wines have the tannin and the structure that the rest of the denomination generally does not aim for.

At the Table Salumi, and specifically the salame di Varzi made in the same hills; also risotto, fried lake fish, and pizza. The frizzante is a genuinely useful food wine because the bubble and the bitterness cut fat better than tannin does. Serve it cool, 14–15°C, and drink the current vintage.

Benchmark Producers Bruno Verdi, Quaquarini, Fiamberti, Vercesi del Castellazzo.