La Dolce Vita Wine Tours

The Dolomites

A Triple Crown: Dolomites, Prosecco & Valpolicella

Tour Overview:

• Enjoy private tastings of Prosecco, Soave, and Amarone
• Daily hikes of 3 to 5 hours
• The rugged beauty of the Dolomites
• World War I battlefields, trenches, and the Open Air Museum in the Dolomites
• The town of Cortina, dubbed “the Pearl of the Dolomites”
• Hiking on the Prosecco Wine Trail (Anello del Prosecco)

This new 8-day hiking and wine tour combines three northern Italian regions: The Dolomites, Valdobbiadene (Prosecco territory), and Valpolicella (Amarone). This year, it’s replacing our regular ITALIAN ALPS tour, which will reappear on the calendar in 2012.

We’ll move from east to west, starting in the Dolomites, among the most spectacular mountain landscapes in the world. We’ll do some classic hikes in this area, including the Tre Cime di Lavaredo and the ring around Mt. Nuvolau. In these peaks, Italians and Austrians clashed during World War I, and today one can still see trenches and canons, and even find bullet casings on the rocky slopes. We’ll visit some of these sites, as well as an open-air museum commemorating these difficult battles.

On day 4, we move to gentler terrain in the area around Valdobbiadene, where the best Prosecco is made. We’ll hike two days here, then continue east to the Valpolicella region, basing ourselves in a villa between Verona and Lake Garda, with easy access to Amarone wineries.

Altogether, you’ll see a wide range of landscapes, from sublime to sweet hills. And you’ll taste an equally wide range of wines, from festive sparkler Prosecco, to the aromatic wines of the Veneto and Friuli, to massive, fruit-packed Amarones made with partially dried grapes.