The Malvasia del Lazio grape variety, also known as Malvasia Puntinata, gets its name from being widely cultivated in Lazio, where it is mainly grown in the production areas of Marino DOC and Castelli Romani DOC wines. It is often mistakenly confused with Malvasia di Candia and Malvasia del Chianti. Due to its significant sensitivity to most vine diseases, many producers replaced it with Malvasia di Candia, which is more resistant but of decidedly lower quality. Today, there is a gradual replanting of this grape variety, and it is not uncommon to find excellent wines made exclusively with Malvasia del Lazio. The Malvasia del Lazio grape variety has a good capacity for concentrating sugars, making it suitable for producing sweet wines from late harvests.
The name Malvasia refers to many grape varieties, most of them white, geographically distributed throughout Italy. Although they have different origins, all these varieties share some basic characteristics: they all have, to varying degrees of intensity, a spicy fragrance of musk and apricot and relatively high residual sugar levels. These characteristics make the Malvasia group of grape varieties particularly suitable for the production of sparkling wines and passiti (dessert wines). The name “Malvasia” derives from a contracted variation of Monembasia, a Byzantine stronghold perched on the rocks of a promontory in the south of the Peloponnese, where sweet wines were produced and then exported throughout Europe by the Venetians under the name of Monemvasia. The wine made from this variety became extremely popular, so much so that Venice was full of taverns called Malvase, dedicated to its consumption.
