WINE NEWS /
Vintage Amarone discovery re-awakens origin debate
Vintage bottles of Valpolicella, Recioto, and Amarone,
produced by the Cantina Sociale Valpolicella di Negrar—dated
1936, 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1942—have recently been sold to
the Cantina by an anonymous collector for an undisclosed sum. The
bottles are reported to be in excellent condition and their labels
intact.
A 1939 bottle of Amarone Extra included in the collection
is particularly significant: until its discovery the earliest official
mention of Amarone appeared in a 1942 "packing list" for
2 liters of Amarone sent by the Cantina to a client in Udine (Friuli).
The appearance of these bottles has re-awakened the
debate on the origin of Amarone: was Amarone created when an absent-minded
cellar master left some Recioto in a fermentation barrel for an extended
period or was the wine developed intentionally in the 1930s because
consumers outside the Veneto preferred drier, less sweet wines?
According to legend, the Cantina Sociale's cellar
master Adelino Lucchese forgot about some Recioto that he had left
in a fermentation barrel. When one of the Cantina's founders, Gaetano
dall'Ora, tasted the wine, the sugar had been completely fermented,
resulting in a much drier wine. In the wake of their "eureka"
moment, they called the wine "Amarone Extra" (amarone,
"very bitter," from the Italian amaro or "bitter").
Recioto [reh-CHOH-toh] is a passito
or dried-grape, sweet wine that has been produced in Valpolicella
since the 19th century (the name comes from recia [reh-CHAH],
Veronese dialect for "ear," because the grapes are selected
from the prized "ears" or upper twigs of the vine where
the grapes ripen more quickly than those lower to the ground). Until
the second half of the twentieth-century, wine drinkers outside the
Veneto preferred drier wines to be paired with roasted meats. The
wine was consumed only locally until tastes began to change after
WWII.
Although other wineries began producing Amarone in
the 1950s, the wine did not achieve widespread popularity until the
1970s. Today, Recioto and Amarone are coveted as some of Italy's most
collectable wines.
Related wines and links: Veneto,
Amarone, Quintarelli,
Allegrini,
Bussola, Begali,
Dal Forno,
Nicholis, Novaia
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