During the last weekend, Verona was the stage for the annual "Anteprima Amarone" event, organized by the Consorzio Tutela Vini Valpolicella (the official association of Valpolicella producers) and dedicated to introducing Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG 2010 vintage to the wine world. And the first thing you have to note is the DOCG acronym, it indicates that starting from this vintage Amarone is "Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita", or "Appellation Controlled and Guaranteed", a higher level of certification with respect to the DOC you were used to.

Well, we have to say that there are some controversial aspects about this event: among the 58 wineries, most of them were presenting wine samples from their barrels, wines that are set to be sold in the future; others, were presenting wines already bottled and that they started to sell since December 2013, as stated by the local rules. 

Here at Terroir Amarone, we are ideologically opposite to this kind of event. The wine industry here is not prepared to market properly an "en primeur" sales and marketing system. When "Anteprima Amarone" was conceived (about a dozen of years ago), the medium term objective or their creators was to push the producers to build such system, helping wine professionals to reach the proper knowledge about Amarone wines in order to make correct assumptions about their evolution and helping to determine sales trends.

But the truth is that this Anteprima is merely a tasting event for wine journalists and wine professionals. And the fact is that most part of these people visit Valpolicella once a year (at best), they don't know where Marano di Valpolicella or Valpantena are, they didn't have the opportunity to study the different wines coming from 13 different valleys and production areas and to match them with different styles, blends, etc. What they know comes from a 2 hours serial tasting of about 60 Amarone (at an average of 16% alcohol each), and after that they make their judgements.

And so, you are going to read some reports on the web. We don't want to be part of this game.

We trust more

We trust more, indeed, in the good work of a team of 11 local wine makers, lead by Daniele Accordini, V.President of Consorzio Valpolicella and General Manager of Cantina Valpolicella Negrar, with the help of Alberto Ugolini, an experienced sensory analyst that created the format of this tasting (like it was also for 2008 and 2009 vintages).

Their work was presented at the Anteprima Amarone conference, and here below you can find an extract we made from an 85 slides presentation in Italian (eventually available, if you request here or download it here, the PDF file is in Italian). We tried to highlight the essential facts about this Amarone 2010 vintage.

Enjoy the presentation.