I knew nothing about Amarone so our visit to winemaker Nicolis this past April was a most enjoyable education particularly when accompanied by copious amounts of food and wine at dinner and a twilight walk in Verona. The tasting of good Amarone also debunked my view that this wine tends to be sweet. It was, in fact, one of the nicer red wines we tried on our wine tour of Italy.
After the rugged scenery of Sicily, we were back in the rolling hills and sculpted gardens of northern Italy. The Valpolicella is famed for its production of amarone and wine made from local grapes – corvina, rondinella, molinara and croatina.
Amarone is distinct from other wine due to its unique production. After the grapes are harvested, they are in fact left to dry for three months. So by the time they are crushed to extract the juices for wine, they are probably more like raisins. Hence, to produce a bottle of Amarone requires more grapes (twice as much) than other red wines.
Amarone shouldn’t be sweet because while the grapes are harvested ripe and then dried, the subsequent fermentation process turns sugars into alcohol. This is one reason why Amarones have higher alcohol content (15%) than most other wines (11%-13%). Amarone is left to age in barrels for anywhere from two to five years with the latter being the traditional requirement. It’s only if the fermentation process is shortened that there will be more sugar and a sweeter tasting wine that is the Recioto, a dessert wine. The leftover skins from the Amarone and Recioto, can also be used to mix with Valpolicella Classico wine to produce Ripasso, an alternative red.
On to the tasting. We took a drive to Verona where we walked to a nice rustic trattoria with a fantastic cellar. Along the way, we entered the old city from the Castel Vecchio bridge, walked by the Verona Arena and through the main shopping streets.
Our dinner and wine tasting was held at the Bottega del Vino, which was a very popular restaurant judging by how busy the place was. One of the typical Veronese dishes is horsemeat, which they do have available. But generally, we stuck with a platter of cold cuts to start with and each ordered our own subsequent dishes. The food is traditional and I had a suckling pig as my main. The food was very good but I had few photos due to the dim light and I hate using the flash.
Bottega del Vino possesses an amazing wine cellar but as it is, numerous bottles line the walls and shelves around the restaurant. But it is also the wonderful old look and feel of the wine bar/restaurant that gives the sense that you could have stepped back into the renaissance (the establishment’s roots date back to the 16th century).
We tasted two Amarone Classicos – 2008 and 2009 vintages – a Ripasso 2011, an Ambrosan Amarone 2005 and a Testal 2008, all from the Nicolis stable. The difference between the Ambrosan Amarone and the Amarone Classico is that the former consists of grapes from a single vineyard and is aged in a mix of Slovenian and French oak barrels. Without a doubt the Amarone was better liked over the other wines but between the Ambrosan and the Classico, there was probably a split in preference.
As we also had champagne and a Recioto with our dessert, it was no surprise that we were well inebriated by the time we finished our meal – it was also close to midnight. So we had a late night walk through some of Verona’s most famous sights.
This was one of the more memorable nights on our April wine tour of Italy – partly because Verona is such a special city as is Amarone wine but also because our hosts from Nicolis were so much fun. We had a lot of laughs.
Nicolis website: http://www.vininicolis.com/eng/index.php
Bottega del Vino website: http://www.bottegavini.it/bottegavini/index.php?lang=en