Venice food and wine tours: what the Veneto actually drinks

Prosecco. It comes from the hills an hour north of Venice and in a bàcaro it is a working drink rather than a celebration. Dry, cheap, and poured all day.

Soave. White, from the hills east of Verona. At its best it is mineral and restrained, which is exactly what you want next to a plate of fried fish.

Custoza and Lugana. Whites from around Lake Garda, still in the Veneto’s orbit. Lugana in particular has become the thing better bars pour when they want to show you something.

Valpolicella. Red, light, and normally served slightly cool here. The big Amarone made from dried grapes is the same region taken to an extreme — excellent, expensive, and not an ombra.

Raboso and other local reds. Sharp, rustic, and mostly drunk within fifty kilometres of where they are made. If a guide offers you one, take it: you will not find it at home.

And the spritz, which is not wine but is the thing Venice drinks at six o’clock: white wine or prosecco, soda, and a bitter. In this city it is usually Select, the local one, or Aperol. Campari makes it a Milanese drink and people will say so.

The spritz began as an Austrian habit — soldiers in the nineteenth century watering down local wine, spritzen, to make it drinkable — and it stayed after the Austrians left. What it became is a bitter aperitivo: wine or prosecco, soda water, and a shot of something red or orange.

In Venice the bitter is usually Select, which is made here and is slightly darker and more herbal than the alternatives, or Aperol, which is from Padua and sweeter. Campari makes it stronger and more bitter and marks it as a Milanese drink; order it and a Venetian bartender may raise an eyebrow, entirely good-naturedly.

It comes with an olive or a slice of orange depending on which bitter went in, it costs three or four euros standing at the counter, and it is drunk between six and eight rather than after dinner. Every food tour on this page will put one in your hand at some point, and if you only learn one thing about drinking in Venice, this is the useful one.