Region & History

In the year 533, Cassiodorus, the chief minister at the court of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic in Verona, wrote a letter to the farmers of the Valpolicella. He wanted Acinaticum for the royal table — a wine made from partially dried grapes, sweet, thick, and so powerful that, in Cassiodorus's own words, it was both food and drink at once. This technique predates the name Amarone by more than a thousand years. Even then, it was already routine.

At the same time, the lagoon was becoming a hub for foreign wine. In 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, Venice conquered the Greek island of Monemvasia and from then on controlled the trade in Malvasia, a sweet wine that soon came to be regarded as the finest in all of Europe. The city developed its own venues for it, called malvasie, and by the early sixteenth century the government had capped their number at twenty. But the true vineyard of the Republic lay not in the lagoon, but in the hinterland.

In 1936, cellar master Adelino Lucchese found a forgotten barrel of Recioto at the Cantina Sociale Valpolicella. This was the sweet passito that had already brought fame to the Valpolicella. Fermentation had kept working until no sugar remained. What had been expected to be a sweet wine turned into something else entirely: powerful, deep, and completely dry. No longer an amaro, but an Amarone. The first bottle bearing this name went on sale that very same year.

Legally, this discovery took decades to catch up: in 1968, Valpolicella, Soave, and Bardolino were granted DOC status. But Amarone was included only as a special variant of Recioto. It wasn't until December 2009 that Amarone and Recioto della Valpolicella received their own DOCG, effective from the 2010 vintage. That same winter, Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore was also elevated to this status: two entirely different wines, one year of recognition.

Not every Venetian tradition lives in a bottle. In Bassano del Grappa, right beside the Old Bridge designed by Palladio, Bortolo Nardini founded Italy's oldest still-operating grappa distillery in 1779. Grappa is made from what's left after pressing — the pomace. Nothing goes to waste here, neither the grape nor, as the 1936 barrel proved, even a mistake.