{"id":945,"date":"2026-10-30T15:51:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T14:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thelandofvenice.com\/venezia-malvasia-storia\/"},"modified":"2026-10-30T16:38:46","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T15:38:46","slug":"venice-malvasia-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelandofvenice.com\/en\/venice-malvasia-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Malvasia and Venice: the Wine Named After a Harbour"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In San Fantin, a few steps from La Fenice, a covered passage still carries the name Sotoportego de la Malvasia Vechia. It is one of the last traces in the city of a wine that Venice bought, shipped, taxed and sold across Europe for centuries, and that took its name from a fortified harbour in the Peloponnese. <\/p>\n\n

How is Malvasia linked to Venice?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Malvasia was the name Venetian merchants gave to the sweet wines that reached them from the Levant, beginning with those shipped from Monemvasia, a name Italians shortened to Malvasia. Venice controlled the trade for centuries, moved production to Crete and its other possessions, and called the shops where the wine was sold \u00abmalvasie\u00bb. The link is above all commercial and linguistic: the grapes known as malvasia today, Malvasia Istriana included, are a mixed family that share a name rather than a common ancestry. <\/p>\n\n

Monemvasia, the town with a single entrance<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Monemvasia is a rock fortress on the eastern coast of Laconia, joined to the mainland by a single approach, which is what its Greek name means. In the Middle Ages its harbour gathered the wine of the hinterland and the nearby islands, and by the early thirteenth century that wine was already associated with the town’s name. By the fourteenth century, on the markets of Venice, \u00abmalvasia\u00bb meant a style of wine, sweet and strong enough to survive long sea voyages. <\/p>\n\n

Venice only took the town itself later. Monemvasia came under the Republic in the mid-fifteenth century, during the war with the Ottomans, and stayed Venetian until 1540, when peace with the sultan forced Venice to give up its last possessions in the Morea. It returned to Venice for a few decades around the turn of the eighteenth century, during the Venetian reconquest of the Morea. <\/p>\n\n

From Crete to the Rialto<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

The name travelled further than the wine. Over time merchants applied it to sweet wines made elsewhere, and for Venice the heart of production became Crete, which the Republic ruled until the fall of Candia in 1669. Galleys loaded barrels in the island’s harbours for Venice and for the markets of the north: in 1431 the merchant Pietro Querini sailed from Candia with hundreds of barrels of malvasia bound for Flanders. <\/p>\n\n

In Venice, malvasia had places of its own. The \u00abmalvasie\u00bb were shops specialising in the sweet wines of the Levant, at the top of the city’s hierarchy of wine sellers, above the osterie and the magazeni. According to research presented by Danilo Riponti at the international symposium on the Malvasias of the Mediterranean, their number was capped at twenty in 1514, rose to twenty-eight in 1567 and later reached fifty-six; the sellers had a guild of their own from 1572 to 1765. <\/p>\n\n

When the Republic lost its eastern islands, the demand for sweet wines that kept well shifted towards territories closer to home along its sea routes, Istria and Dalmatia.<\/p>\n\n

Where malvasia survives in Venice’s street names<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

The street names remember what the shops have lost. Besides the Sotoportego de la Malvasia Vechia in San Fantin, the city has a calle, a fondamenta and a bridge carrying the same name, marking places where a malvasia once opened its doors. Spotting them on the nizioleti, the white panels with black lettering painted on the corners of the calli, is a way of reading the old map of Venetian trade. The San Fantin sign, since repainted, now reads \u00abMalvasia Vecchia\u00bb in the Italian spelling, with a double c: one of many cases in the long-running argument over street-name spellings, which many Venetians would like to see restored to their historic Venetian form. <\/p>\n\n

A family of grapes, not a single grape<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

DNA analysis has put an end to the idea that every malvasia descends from a single Greek grape: most of the varieties that carry the name are not related to each other. Over the centuries the name attached itself to different grapes, much as Champagne or Sherry began as places before they became styles. <\/p>\n\n

Malvasia Istriana, the malvasia of the Upper Adriatic, is the clearest case. Genetic studies at the University of Zagreb have found no parents for it in Greece or in Italy, and the most widely held view today is that it was born in Istria. The name comes from Venetian history; the grape, in all likelihood, comes from right here. <\/p>\n\n

Where to find Malvasia today<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Malvasia Istriana is now one of the most widely planted white grapes in Croatia, almost all of it on the hills of Istria, and it crosses the border into Slovenian Istria and Friuli, where it is part of the Collio and Isonzo appellations. In Momjan, in Croatian Istria, the Kozlovi\u0107<\/a> winery has made it the heart of its production. <\/p>\n\n

The Golden Thread of Malvasia<\/a>, our six-day itinerary, travels through the places where this wine is still made, from the Collio to Brda<\/a> and the Karst<\/a>, down to Istria. To choose the wineries, see our guide to the best wineries in Friuli, the Collio and beyond.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n

Sources and further reading<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n