Cerasuolo and Chiaretto: Italy's Serious Rosé Traditions

Italy never called it rosé

Walk the pink aisle of a British supermarket and the range runs from pale salmon to slightly paler salmon. Provence set the template, and most of the wine world followed it. Italy, characteristically, did not. Its pink wines answer to rosato, and the two most serious traditions, Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo and the Chiaretto wines of Lake Garda, have been made with intent since long before pale became fashionable.

There is history behind that confidence. Italy's first bottled rosato was a wartime commission: in 1943, General Charles Poletti, supply commissioner for the Allied forces, asked for a large order of pink wine with an American-sounding name, and the Leone de Castris estate in Puglia answered with Five Roses, a Negroamaro rosato from Salento that is still bottled today.

What Italy never developed is the idea that pink means trivial. Rosato is a parallel craft to red and white winemaking, with its own denominations, its own release rules and, in one Puglian case, the country's only rosé DOCG. For the British drinker it is a genuinely useful stretch: these wines cost Provence money or less and bring far more variety to the table. This piece walks the two poles of the tradition, the cherry-red style of Abruzzo and the pale lakeside style of Garda, then maps the rest of Italian pink between them.

Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo: the cherry-red contrarian

Cerasuolo takes its name from cerasa, dialect for cherry, and the wine wears it literally. This is the deepest-coloured serious rosato in Italy, made from at least 85 per cent Montepulciano, a grape so rich in pigment that even a few hours on the skins leaves a colour most producers elsewhere would call light red. Poured next to a Provence pale it looks almost transgressive, somewhere between wild salmon and morello juice.

For decades it lived inside the Montepulciano d'Abruzzo rulebook, until 2010, when it was carved out as a DOC of its own, complete with a Superiore tier. That separation mattered: it said the pink version of Abruzzo's great red grape was a destination, not a diversion. And if the grape's name trips you up, you are not alone: two very different wines share the Montepulciano name, and only one of them has anything to do with Tuscany.

In the glass, Cerasuolo behaves like no other pink wine. There is red-cherry fruit, orange peel and a savoury, faintly bitter grip that comes straight from Montepulciano's skins. Producers such as Valentini, Emidio Pepe, Tiberio and Cataldi Madonna treat it with the seriousness of their reds, and the wider world has caught up: at the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles in 2024, a tasting of more than 1,200 rosés from 32 countries, a Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo took one of just 13 Grand Gold medals, as Gambero Rosso reported.

Chiaretto: Lake Garda keeps it pale

At the opposite end of the spectrum sits Chiaretto, from chiaro, meaning pale or light. It is made on both shores of Lake Garda, and the lake is the point: a huge, light-filled basin whose mild air lets red grapes ripen gently enough to give delicate, low-colour juice.

The eastern, Veneto shore makes Chiaretto di Bardolino from the same Corvina-led blend as red Bardolino. Its consorzio, founded in 1969 and covering sixteen lakeside municipalities, has spent the last decade steering the wine ever paler, drier and more citrus-fresh, a rare case of an Italian denomination consciously restyling itself around its rosato. The gamble paid off: at the 2024 Concours Mondial de Bruxelles a Chiaretto di Bardolino Classico was named the tasting's international rosé revelation.

The western, Lombardy shore answers with Valtènesi, built on the local Groppello grape across twenty-six communes of morainic hills above the Brescia shoreline. It is, if anything, even paler and more perfumed, all white peach and small red berries. Both shores also bottle a sparkling Chiaretto, a style worth chasing if your default Italian fizz is Prosecco and you fancy the pink lakeside alternative.

From onion skin to cherry: reading the colour spectrum

Italian rosato is best understood as a spectrum of intent, not a single style. Colour is the honest signal of how a wine was made, but never of how good it is. At the pale end sit the Garda wines; in the middle, coral and cherry tones from the south; at the deep end, wines that flirt with light red.

Puglia deserves a special word. Bombino Nero, grown on the Murgia plateau around the octagonal castle of Castel del Monte, is the only rosé in Italy with DOCG status, granted in October 2011, and must make up at least 90 per cent of the blend. Further south, Negroamaro gives Salento its deep, generous pinks, the Five Roses lineage. And one warning for label readers: Sicily's Cerasuolo di Vittoria, despite sharing the cherry name, is a red wine and a DOCG, nothing to do with rosato. Sicily's real pink calling card grows on Etna, where Nerello Mascalese makes pale, mineral rosato on volcanic slopes better known for brooding reds.

Why they taste so different: skins, hours, intent

Every rosato starts the same way: red grapes handled almost like a white wine. Press the fruit quickly and ferment the pale juice cool, and you get Chiaretto's watercolour delicacy. Let the juice sit on the skins for some hours first, and colour, aroma and a little tannin leach in, which is the Cerasuolo route. Our guide to how rosé wine is made walks through the cellar steps; what matters here is that the choice is stylistic, not a shortcut.

Grape variety loads the dice. Montepulciano is one of Italy's most deeply pigmented varieties, so Abruzzo's winemakers could not make a ghost-pale pink if they tried, at least not honestly. Corvina and Groppello sit at the other extreme, thin-skinned and gently coloured, which is why Garda's wines stay pale without artifice. Dryness is the norm in both camps, and neither leans on oak.

Age is the last divider. Chiaretto and Valtènesi are wines of the year, at their best inside eighteen months. Cerasuolo's extra structure lets serious bottlings improve for several years, and Valentini's version is famously drunk at ten or more, an ageing curve closer to a light red than to anything the pink shelf usually promises.

Drinking them in Britain: what to pour, and when

Start with the vintage. For Garda pinks, buy the youngest on the shelf and drink it this summer; for Cerasuolo, a year or two of age is nothing to fear. Price is the quiet argument: fashionable pale rosé now carries a premium, while Italian rosato of equal or better craft often sits a few pounds lower on the same list, and our guide to reading an Italian wine list helps you spot the names once you are out.

At the table, treat the two poles differently. Chiaretto and Valtènesi are aperitivo and first-course wines: lake fish if you can get it, prawns, prosciutto and melon, a tomato-heavy pasta. Cerasuolo is a rosé that behaves like a light red, so give it food with char and fat: arrosticini or any grilled lamb, pizza from a proper oven, aubergine parmigiana. Serve the pale wines properly cold and Cerasuolo just a touch warmer, closer to cellar cool; our serving guide has the numbers.

And if what you actually wanted from pink wine was sweetness, Italy would rather pour you the real thing: its sweet wine tradition is a separate, glorious story. For everything else pink and Italian, from featherweight lake wines to cherry-dark contrarians, the rosato shelf rewards curiosity more than almost any corner of the country.