If you're a fan of Italian wines, chances are you've tasted Amarone della Valpolicella, the renowned Venetian red wine made with dried grapes. And if you're a wine pro, chances are you've attended the latest edition of Amarone Opera Prima, the annual wine event in downtown Verona. It's been 20 years since this wine fair, organized by Consorzio Vini Valpolicella, has been entirely devoted to showcasing the latest vintage of Amarone della Valpolicella for sale. For two decades, wine professionals invited from all over the world have had the opportunity to taste any single wine present at the event, although most of them are still barrel samples. Nevertheless, this year, many foreign colleagues and wine writers may be bewildered by the new style many Amarone wines are beginning to adopt: a more approachable style, lighter in color, and, although not very often, even lower in alcohol content. It's a more friendly, drinkable wine, sometimes even more elegant.
What's happening? To me, it's something good. A return to the past, to the original style of this wine, and I will explain why.
Until a few years ago, Amarone della Valpolicella was immediately recognizable for being an essential red wine: bold, warm, and structured, with scents of dried cherries, tobacco, chocolate, and so on in the nose and on the palate. A muscular wine.
But times change, and so do people's tastes.
One of the main challenges that Valpolicella producers have to deal with nowadays is precisely that: to win over new palates - mainly those of younger consumers - who don't appreciate the "Nineteen" style. These people presumably don't care about the authority of a historic name, but are eager to have new sensory experiences.
I have lived in Valpolicella since 1993, so you can trust me: wines were different back then. I have had the luck to attend some vertical tastings of old vintages of iconic brands (like Bertani), and many Amarones from those years (starting from the 1960s) were small masterpieces of balance and flavors. They were elegant, velvety wines, long and drinkable; drinking them was a pure pleasure. However, back in those days, the production of Amarone was far more limited than it is now: in the 1990s, the Valpolicella denomination covered just 5500 hectares. The wineries were also fewer than they are now.
Starting in 1997, the "Amarone phenomenon" exploded, and production skyrocketed. New producers emerged, and new Amarone wine labels flooded the markets.
Drying the grapes to make wine has always been necessary for the Valpolicella people. Due to its geographic and climatic position, Valpolicella is a cool climate wine production area. In the past, good vintages when grapes ripen perfectly were rare*, and to get an excellent raw material to make prestigious wine like the sweet Recioto della Valpolicella, you had to dry the grapes in some particular rooms called fruit drying sheds for several weeks. In other Italian regions - like the Southern ones - they could do it much easier by laying the bunches on reed trellises and leaving them exposed to the sun and heat. In Valpolicella, they could not do so. Hence, throughout the centuries, they learned how to wither successfully. That's why in the 1990s - the so-called "Parker's style red wines" - Amarone della Valpolicella became suddenly so successful everywhere in the world: people demanded rich, structured, alcoholic, complex, and flavored - bomb fruit wines.
Amarone della Valpolicella was precisely the right wine at the right historical moment. The need to whitering the grapes to make good wines had allowed the Valpolicella wine producers to master a technique that, from then on, almost any producers in the world tried to copy. However, the outcomes were hardly as successful as Amarone's because they also needed the right blend of varieties and did not own them. Corvina, Corvinone, Rondinella, and Molinara are all native grapes in Valpolicella, and - guess what? - all of them are particularly genetically suited to be dried. Many scientific studies prove that.
Back to our chronicle, due to a robust market trend in wine consumption in the 1990s, the "old style" of Amarone (lighter color, freshness, balance, long aging in large casks) was rapidly replaced by the "new style" of wine: a dark red one, bold, alcoholic, and overwhelming. An impressive wine that "snarled at the food," as a wine critic wrote in an article from those years. Most Amarone wines from those years were almost impossible to pair with food (we used to call them "wines eat-and-drink") even because of their high residual sugars.
"Valpolicella producers have been among the best to grasp this need for a smooth, warm, and pleasant wine, suitable for drinking away from meals," claimed Andrea Lonardi MW at the opening conference of "Amarone Opera Prima”. "Therefore, in the last 20 years, Amarone has seen enormous development in volume, and to achieve this, they overdid it with withering and the need to chase a style that this market segment demanded. Today, the market demand of the 1990s is practically flat; it is shrinking because consumers are looking elsewhere."
What to do? The new consumers aren't as eager (as their fathers and grandfathers) to approach that style. They love low-no alcohol wines, organic wines, RTD beverages, etc. They are more sensitive to sustainable practices in the vineyards than to the usual storytelling of a wine made by the father and the grandfather of the father. And so on.
That's why Amarone della Valpolicella must return to its roots. It has to focus more on its origins and a bit less on the method (= withering). And that's why at “Amarone Opera Prima” 2024, you could taste more elegant and fresh wines, most expressive of the territory of origin. I tasted balsamic Amarone from the Mezzane valley, fruity-cherries Amarone from the Negrar valley, and more floral Amarone from the Fumane valley. Each part of Valpolicella has its features, and you can experience them if the producer respects them and doesn't flatten everything with the winemaking technique.
This shift in the style of this important wine may not be easy to figure out, mainly if you don't know Valpolicella's history and its wines (you can fill the gaps by reading my e-book here). But it's vital for the future of this denomination, and the coming years, I suppose, will be dense with studies, research, and experiments.
Exciting times are waiting for us.
*Due to climate change, things are rapidly changing, and it’s likely that the withering duration, now 120 days, will have to be rethought (and shortened).