Do you love Italian wine? Join the crowd - Italian wine is one of the most popular imports; and with over a thousand grape varieties and many different climates, soil types, and elevations, one can easily spend a lifetime understanding the magic of Italian wine. Today let’s just focus on one region, the Valpolicella area in northern Italy, and one producer, Tedeschi, which dates from 1824.
Why speak of Valpolicella at all? Why now? First, some background: Valpolicella is a DOC within the Verona region of Italy (the setting for the play Romeo and Juliet). Go to a wine store and ask the clerk for “a Valpolicella” and you will receive a pleasant, easy-drinking wine (usually under $15) made from three of the region’s five allowed grape varieties, usually a blend of Molinara, Rondinella, and Corvina. You will find the wine refreshing and fruity, meant to “drink now” and not age. So the key element to understand is that Valpolicella is both a region and the name of a local table wine.
Yet take those same allowed grape varieties and produce the wine in a different way and you can get two very different, more expensive, wines. The most expensive wine of the Valpolicella region is called Amarone. You might have heard that name in a Godfather movie or overheard some Wall Street folks order a magnum of it to celebrate a big deal in a popular steakhouse. Amarone is expensive, and you will soon understand the reason for this expense. The “middle” wine — the bridge between the simple Valpolicella and the elegant Amarone — is called Ripasso, and I will explain this production method forthwith.
The reason I am writing about Valpolicella today is that I had the good fortune to lunch with Riccardo Tedeschi, winemaker, enologist, and with his siblings one of the heirs to the Tedeschi Winery, who was visiting Manhattan recently. The Tedeschi family has been producing wine since 1824, and is a big name in the very big business of Amarone production - a leading name. As such, one of Mr. Tedeschi’s objectives is to limit the region’s production of Amarone, which has been increasing in recent years.
Now you may be wondering how Amarone is different than the simple Valpolicella; they have the same or similar grapes, after all. Here is a simplified version of the Amarone story. Healthy ripe grapes from top vineyards are hand selected and harvested in the first two weeks of October. Instead of being pressed and fermented, they are laid on straw mats to dry and shrivel, concentrating the remaining sugars and flavors, for 90-120 days.
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