Veneto

The Veneto: the cradle of Amarone and the territory that reinvented the concept of dried-grape wine

The Veneto is Italy's highest-volume wine region — but behind the industrial figures of supermarket Pinot Grigio and aperitivo Prosecco hides a completely different Venice of wine, made of calcareous hills, ventilated drying lofts, grapes dried for months and wines that require decades to express themselves fully. That Venice of wine is called Valpolicella — and it produces some of the most complex, long-lived and fascinating reds in Italy.

The Valpolicella is a territory of hills north-west of Verona, wedged between Lake Garda to the west and the Lessini hills to the north, divided into a historic Classico zone — the valleys of Negrar, Marano, Fumane, Sant'Ambrogio and San Pietro in Cariano — and a broader DOC zone that embraces the eastern municipalities as far as the Val d'Illasi and Val Tramigna. Here grows Corvina Veronese — the Veneto's most important indigenous variety, which in combination with Corvinone, Rondinella, Molinara, Oseleta and other nearly forgotten varieties produces the richest and most varied range of quality red wines of any Italian appellation.

The absolute king is Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG — one of the world's great red wines, produced from grapes dried for 90 to 120 days in traditional fruttaio, fermented to dryness and aged for years in wood before release. It is not a sweet wine — it is the opposite: "amaro" is its name, in contrast to the sweetness of the Recioto that preceded it by centuries. Powerful, concentrated, long-lived, with an aromatic complexity that defies categorisation and a capacity for bottle evolution that can exceed thirty years in the finest vintages. But alongside the Amarone of great occasions and collectors, the Valpolicella offers a complete scale of expressions: the fresh and fragrant Valpolicella Classico to drink young, the structured Ripasso born from refermentation on Amarone pomace — the so-called "little Amarone" — the oak-aged Valpolicella Superiore, all the way to the very rare Recioto della Valpolicella DOCG, Verona's oldest sweet red wine, the one the Romans drank two thousand years ago on these same hills.

The Veneto of red wines is not, however, only Valpolicella. It is also the Colli Berici and Colli Euganei with their Vicentine and Paduan Cabernet and Merlot, the Bardolino on Lake Garda with its fragrant lightness, the eastern Valpolicella of the Val d'Illasi with producers like Dal Forno Romano who have redefined the limits of what is possible for this appellation. And finally the Valpolicella of the new arrivals — visionary winegrowers like Hannes Pichler of Contrada Palui who farm at 500 metres altitude on volcanic soils and produce Amarone of a freshness and transparency the appellation had never known before.

Emporio Divino offers the deepest and most coherent selection of Veneto red wines available online — not the most commercial and widely distributed names, but the artisan producers who tell the story of the Valpolicella with honesty, originality and respect for a territory that deserves far more recognition than the mass market has so far given it.