Heletto - Garbole

Heletto is the iconic wine of Garbole, one of the most fascinating and authentic estates in the Valpolicella. Produced with 50% of its blend from nearly forgotten indigenous varieties — grapes that most producers abandoned decades ago — it is rare by definition: 10,000 bottles per year, available through a very limited number of selected retailers worldwide.

Heletto is where the story of Garbole begins — the wine that introduces you to a philosophy that then escalates through the Hurlo, the Hatteso and the Hestremo into territory that no other Valpolicella producer dares to explore. If those three wines represent the extreme limits of what Garbole is capable of, the Heletto is the entry point — the wine that first shows you what happens when a winery chooses the forgotten over the familiar, the authentic over the commercial, the territory over the trend.

The blend brings together Corvina and Corvinone at 50% as the structural backbone, combined with an equal 50% of indigenous varieties preserved and cultivated by Garbole from vineyards that would otherwise have disappeared entirely. One month of partial drying concentrates the fruit and adds aromatic depth without transforming the wine into a full appassimento style. Then 84 months — seven full years — of ageing in new French and American oak barriques, a combination that brings the finesse and spice of French oak together with the vanilla and fruit-rounding of American oak, integrating over years into a complexity that could not be achieved in any shorter timeframe. Six months of bottle ageing complete the journey before release. The 2017 vintage was released after over eight years of total ageing.

The colour is deep ruby red, almost impenetrable. On the nose it is powerful and intriguing: black pepper, wild blackberries, aromatic herbs, leather and dried flowers — and beneath all of this, a ferrous and almost metallic minerality that is the unmistakable signature of the indigenous varieties Garbole has chosen to save. On the palate it is austere and complex, with dense tannins that evolve magnificently over time towards a surprising finesse. A meditation wine that tells the story of a territory and a forgotten grape. One of the most identity-defining wines in the Emporio Divino selection.