Is wine tasting in lake Garda a good idea for a family?

October 31, 2022

I planned a holiday to Italy for my family of four to lake garda, a destination I had always hoped to visit in Italy. My kids are now 17 and 20. To make the trip cost effective I had to think outside the box with flights and accommodation. The most competitive flights to lake Garda where flying into Bergamo, Milan which is located approx. 72 miles southwest of Verona.

Because my “kids” requested an onsite swimming pool, I chose Bella Italia campsite as our accommodation for seven days of the ten days stay. The remaining three days to be spent in Bergamo with a trip into Milan as a bonus.

Of course, no holiday is complete without a few family excursions, so I booked wine tasting, Verona arena opera and Caneva water park among others to make the most out of the trip.

The trip to the arena was scheduled early in the holiday and was absolutely fantastic, I couldn’t have hoped for a better experience, it met all my expectations of an open-air opera. The Turandot show we booked finished with a great finale and we left the arena around midnight still singing the last song.

The wine tasting trip was something we had never experienced before, and we didn’t quite know what to expect. Probably because I had been to whiskey distillery tours in the past, I had built up an expectation of an educational tour of the vineyard, a tour of the processing procedures and bottling plant. The wine tasting experience was somewhat different as it was much more intimate as our host met us at the entrance and sat us down at a shaded table in the middle of a beautiful vineyard.

I had booked my youngest daughter as underage as she was 17 and assumed that she would not be allowed any alcohol in Italy. I have to say this is why I love Italians, the host asked us did we mind if she drank wine. We didn’t mind as we had always thought that it would be better for our 17-year-old to be introduced to alcohol under our supervision rather than be exposed to it without any supervision.

The host sat us down, talked us through the different wines as we drank them starting with white wines and moving onto rose and finishing with red wine. The wine was fantastic and was complemented by cheese boards and home baked bread and olive oil. The best part was probably when the host took a bunch of grapes off the vine and let us taste them, there and then. I have to say what an education, they were absolutely exquisite with a taste like no other grapes I have ever tasted. The freshness was something that here in the UK, we are not used to.

Our only complaint was that it had to end all too soon and we would have to make our way home, we didn’t leave without buying a magnum of their best wine however, a Merlot Rugra which we save for a special occasion.

To answer the question is wine tasting in Italy a good idea for a family, depending on their age, it is almost certainly a great idea. I’m not sure it would be a good idea for a family with kids under 17, as it does concentrate almost entirely on drinking wine.