Valpolicella, Ripasso, Amarone, Recioto: Four Wines, One Recipe

The valley and the blend

Nineteen municipalities in the province of Verona — Fumane, Grezzana and their neighbours — in the hills that run north and east of the city. Recognised as a denomination in 1973, though the winemaking is very much older.

The blend is fixed and shared: Corvina Veronese and Corvinone together make up between 45% and 95%, Rondinella between 5% and 30%, with a limited share of other approved red varieties of the province permitted. That is the constant. Everything that separates the four wines happens after the grapes are picked.

That is genuinely unusual. Most wine regions differentiate their products by site, by variety, or by ageing. Here one valley takes one harvest and processes it four ways, and the resulting wines have almost nothing in common in the glass.

Valpolicella: the wine the others are made from

The base denomination. A vino dell'annata — a wine of the year — requiring no mandatory ageing, capped at 12 tonnes per hectare, with a minimum of 11% alcohol.

The official description is precise and worth quoting against its reputation: light, ruby shading to garnet, a delicate aroma often reminiscent of bitter almonds, a velvety finish. This is a fresh red meant to be drunk young and slightly cool.

It is also the least respected of the four, and unfairly so. When Amarone and Ripasso became legally autonomous in 2010 and 2011, the base Valpolicella was left holding the name without the prestige. But a good one is exactly what a great deal of Italian food wants: acidity, modest alcohol, and no oak.

Ripasso: the second use of the same grapes

Ripasso is a technique that became a denomination. Autonomous since 2011.

The process: finished Valpolicella is passed back over the pomace left behind by Amarone or Recioto — the skins that still hold sugar, colour and extract — and refermented on it. The disciplinare puts numbers on what is otherwise folklore. The operation must last at least three days, and the liquid fraction must represent between 10% and 15% of the treated volume.

The blend requirement shifts slightly: at least 45% Corvina Veronese and/or Corvinone, at least 5% Rondinella. The finished wine must reach 12.5% alcohol, a full point and a half above the base Valpolicella, and it carries a year of ageing.

Commercially, Ripasso is the most interesting of the four. It delivers a substantial part of Amarone's weight and texture at a fraction of the cost, because it is built on a by-product. The industry name for it — 'baby Amarone' — is condescending but not wrong about what it does for a wine list.

Amarone and Recioto: the drying, and the arithmetic

Both start the same way. The best bunches are set aside after harvest and dried for months, losing water and concentrating sugar, colour and tannin.

Amarone ferments that concentrated must all the way to dryness. Its defining rule is a yield ceiling: a maximum of 40% of the dried grapes' weight may become wine, against 70% for a standard Valpolicella. It must reach at least 14% alcohol and age a minimum of 24 months, 48 for the Riserva.

Recioto stops the fermentation while sugar remains, producing the sweet wine that is historically the oldest of the four — Amarone began as a Recioto whose fermentation refused to stop.

The 40% figure is the whole price story. Roughly a hundred kilos of grapes give at most forty litres, against seventy for the base wine, and then the wine sits for two years before it can be sold. A genuinely cheap Amarone is a contradiction: either the grapes were not dried properly or someone is losing money.

How to buy across the four

For a by-the-glass red: base Valpolicella. Fresh, low alcohol, no oak, and it flatters food rather than competing with it.

For the middle of a list, where most restaurant margin lives: Ripasso. It reads as a serious wine to the guest and costs like a by-product, because it is one.

For the top: Amarone, and read the ageing. Twenty-four months is the floor, forty-eight makes it a Riserva.

For dessert, or for the cheese course where a sweet red beats a sweet white: Recioto, which almost nobody lists and which is the valley's original wine.

The mistake to avoid is treating these as four price points of one product. They are four denominations with four different production costs, and a guest who liked the Ripasso will not necessarily like the Amarone.

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