Hestremo - Garbole

Hestremo. Garbole’s fourth H. After the silent Heletto, the shouting Hurlo, and the contemplative Hatteso, Hestremo brings this linguistic code into the realm of sweetness - Recioto della Valpolicella DOCG in the most extreme and personal version that a rebellious winery like Garbole could imagine.

"Hestremo" - extreme, at the limit, beyond the boundary. No name could be more fitting to describe what happens when Garbole’s production philosophy - nearly extinct native grape varieties, minimal intervention, and the pursuit of the fullest expression of the terroir - is applied to Valpolicella’s oldest sweet wine. If traditional Recioto is already a rare and precious wine, Garbole’s Hestremo is something completely different - a Recioto made from grapes that most producers have forgotten, crafted by those who chose to remember.

The Oseleta grapes and the other exceptionally rare native varieties cultivated by Garbole are selected bunch by bunch and dried for an extended period in the drying room - well beyond the standard 90 days - concentrating a quantity of sugars, aromas, and extract that is rarely achieved even in the finest traditional Recioto wines. Fermentation is stopped with great precision before all the sugars have been consumed, preserving a natural sweetness of rare depth and complexity, and the wine matures in small casks made of fine wood for as long as necessary to reach that impossible balance between power, sweetness, and freshness.

On the nose, it is overwhelming and utterly unique: wild black fruits in a dense preserve (blackberry, blueberry, wild blackthorn), bitter dark chocolate, resin, sweet tobacco, exotic spices (long pepper, cinnamon, cloves), withered violet, aromatic roots, and an almost obsessive iron-like minerality that is the unmistakable signature of Garbole’s grape varieties. On the palate, it is an intense sensory experience that is difficult to categorize: profoundly deep yet never cloying natural sweetness, an almost tactile density, and dense, velvety tannins that play with the sweetness in an equilibrium of rare perfection, followed by a finish that lasts for minutes, with successive waves of fruit, spice, and minerality. A wine to drink in very small quantities, in silence, with the awareness that you are tasting something that exists nowhere else.