AMARONE DELLA VALPOLICELLA DOC "CAMPO LEON" Latium

A great "bitter"

It is one of the great Italian wines and has an ancient history even if the current name was born in 1936. Before this date it could be considered a Recioto Secco or Amaro deriving from the great sweet wine Recioto della Valpolicella. In 1936 at the Cantina Sociale Valpolicella, in that period at Albizzano della Valpolicalla in Villa Mosconi, the young Adelino Lucchese after the fortuitous discovery of an abandoned cask of Recioto and tasting it waiting for a Recioto Secco or Amaro said: "Questo non è un Amaro ma un Amarone!”, inventing the name of one of the greatest wines in the world. The wine was initially unstable and since 1942 we have seen the first labels that will lead to a marketing with this name only in 1953 by the Bolla wine cellar. The secret of this wine is based on the production process. It starts from a highly selected selection of Valpolicella grapes, they are dried on trellis in a ventilated environment for about 120 days then, with the high concentration of sugars and alcohol given by the drying, it is vinified with a prolonged fermentation that first leads to the sweet Recioto wine through a block of fermentation through the use of temperature. If fermentation is allowed to continue at a low temperature up to 30/40 days. the sugars contained in the Recioto are almost all transformed into alcohol, thus returning to a dry wine and acquiring the name of Amarone. If this miracle of oenology has been known for less than a century, the hints of a similar wine are many. Already Catullus speaks of "calices amariores", in Carme 27 (in 49 BC), Cassiodorus speaks of Aciniatico della Valpolicella at Teodorico's canteen which, according to researchers of the 900, seems to be among others a "recchioto amaro". There are also references to the Roman and pre-Roman Reticum, and a wide range of edicts, transactions and recognitions of dark wines in Valpolicella that seem to refer to the Amarone until the modern consecration starting in 1936.