AMARONE DELLA VALPOLICELLA The Essential Guide

The Study Library · The Cellar Journal

Amarone della Valpolicella is one of Italy's most recognizable red wines, yet it is also one of the easiest to misunderstand. Its concentration, alcohol, dried-fruit character and extended ageing can make Amarone appear to be primarily a style created in the cellar. In part, it is. Few major fine wines depend so fundamentally on a deliberate transformation of the harvested grape before fermentation begins.

But Amarone is not simply the result of appassimento.

Its identity begins in Valpolicella, in the hills north of Verona, where valleys descending from the Lessini Mountains create a complex landscape of altitude, exposure, limestone, marl, volcanic material and alluvial deposits. Corvina, Corvinone and Rondinella respond differently across these sites, and the fruit selected for drying already carries the conditions of the vineyard into the fruttaio.

Then the process changes everything.

For weeks or months after harvest, grapes lose water while sugars, acids, phenolics and flavour compounds become increasingly concentrated. Fermentation takes place considerably later than in most red-wine regions, and the resulting wine combines the signatures of both vineyard and method.

This is the central tension in understanding Amarone: how much of the finished wine comes from place, and how much comes from appassimento?

The greatest Amarone does not require us to choose between the two.

It requires them to work together.