In Italy, you won’t find too many bunny symbols for Easter. Here, it is eggs, lambs, and doves that are celebrated with the season, and one especially sweet example is the sweet dove-shaped Colomba cake.
All around the country, as Easter approaches, pastry shops and market shelves fill with this culinary tradition that is buttery and sweet but not too sweet with a soft dough that is slightly chewy. Outside of Italy, you can find the cake in fine Italian food markets, or look for recipes to make it at home.
But what is the best wine to pair with a slice of Colomba? Here are the suggestions of Sensorial Wine Analyst Luca Maroni.
Pair Colomba with a Passito – Donna Daria Baon Fior d’Arancio Passito La Montecchia
“What fragrance and what clarity of scents the fruit in the La Montecchia glass has. Donna Daria Baon Fior d’Arancio Passito confirms itself as one of the best Italian sweet wines. A raisin wine of the utmost density that opens to the nose with excellent floral sweetness, balsams that are creamily wrapped in drapes of pulpiness from the sumptuous extract of the fruit.”
“Its sunshine colour, its golden hue and the sunshine of its rich base essence. A true pulp of grapes and vanilla spices, with even more aromatic notes of cedar and mandarin. The palate is a phase of structure: a dense, viscous feel, a texture and concentration that do not shock, but give power and persistence to the perfect acid/soft souplesse of its rounded taste. All rendered with splendid, rare oenological clarity of execution, with oxidative integrity that gives the sample an unadulterated expressive fragrance.”
Pair Colomba with a Moscato – Alpianae Moscato Fior d’Arancio Vignalta
“The fruit of Alpianae Moscato Fior d’Arancio by Vignalta is a masterpiece of technique and nature. Here we are truly at levels of pleasantness and fruitiness that are irresistibly universal. Here the language is that of nature itself, one that needs no interpreter. If anything, one can attempt to describe the sensory harvest of pulp and floral allure that can be sensed here without rest, without stain, without a pause for power of any kind, here with regal density.”
“The result is a fruity wine of triumphant pulpiness and viscosity, of fragrantly exceptional flavour balance, of oenological clarity of execution that at these levels of pulp and concentration such integrity is technically rare even if olfactory marvellous. Here, then, is the fig, the sumptuous companion of its grape, vanilla queen of richness in floral and spicy notes, sovereign indeed. The best sweet Italian wine of the year, certainly among the richest and most harmonious ever.”
Pair Colomba with a Recioto – Recioto di Soave Incanto Corte Moschina
The third and final wine suggested by Luca Maroni for pairing with the Easter Colomba is Corte Moschina’s Recioto di Soave Incanto. “A true spectacle of fruit and spices, an authentic treasure trove of pulp, sugar and the power of a persuasively queenly aroma.” This sweet wine is made from a careful selection of Garganega grapes harvested in September and left to dry in the fruit cellar until March. After fermentation, it is left to mature for a few years in small barriques, obtaining a delicate, sweetly aromatic wine, typical of the production area, perfect to accompany a slice of Colomba.