What's going on in Valpolicella?

…A new breeze has risen and, as usually occurs in human affairs, it’s blowing from the youth.

Recently I’ve been invited to have a tasting of Valpolicella wines produced by a group of small-and-young-and-“natural”- producers. 

They are 8 people based mainly in the Eastern part of the Valpolicella denomination, with small wineries and pretty limited production of wine. They all are friends, and often gather to taste their wine, exchange views and solutions about common problems. You would think they are competitors, but actually, as producers, they have chosen the path of co-opetition.

Thus in 2019, they founded an association: “ReValpo”. In Italian, the word re means king, so I thought that maybe the meaning of the name is “King Valpo(licella)”, but I was wrong. The actual meaning is “Re-wind Valpo(licella)”. If you are, ehm, a bit older than a teen, for sure you remember the magnetic tapes of our first walkman: when you wanted to listen to a song again, pressed the rewind button and voilà - you jumped back in the time. The guys in “ReValpo” association are aimed to do exactly this: to reconnecting themselves and the consumers to the origins of Valpolicella wine. 

They are (still) young enough to not have lived the hard times of Valpolicella wines of the past when people preferred to sell the vineyards to building companies and leaving the countryside because the viticulture didn’t give them enough to live. At the same time though, they are old enough to be living the current luckier days of Amarone and Ripasso as an international success. 

A success that risks losing the authentic soul of the denomination.

“In the last 20-25 we saw a Valpolicella region looking for its identity while chasing after the lure of foreign markets, partly ashamed of its rural origins” - they said - That’s why we founded our association: to trying to re-found Valpolicella bottom-up”. The 8 producers share the idea of an artisanal wine far from an excessively commercial logic; a wine that emphasizes the identity of the territory of origin and the rediscovery of native varieties. Above all, they want to respect their land, excluding all forms of chemical synthesis, with particular attention to sustainable agriculture. Can we define them as revolutionists? I wouldn’t say that: they are just an umpteenth expression of a culture that is shaking the Italian wine world (and not only that). However, in a denomination that recently has been counting mainly on the success of a wine - Ripasso della Valpolicella: 30 million bottles/year - finding a group of wineries which decided to not produce a drop of that product, well, this is new.

Let’s come back to the wines I tasted: 8 fresh Valpolicella from as many areas, here and there, between West and East Valpolicella. Some of them are juicy, fruity, friendly; some others a bit introvert, herbaceous more than fruity, some balsamic, some other a bit out of balance (but it's just a matter of time, is going to be very good). All of them, more or less, delightfully imperfect, an imperfection that makes you come out with “oh, this is from Marano valley! Wow, don’t you feel the savouriness of the volcanic soil of Lavagno? This cherry taste cannot be anything other than from Marcellise”. And so on.

Obviously, to experience all that you must know the Valpolicella denomination quite deeply. Those wines speak the local language of their patch of land: you can understand it if you know that land.

And this is the best part of the whole thing.

You can find who are the “ReValpo” guys here. In the picture, each of them is showing something they love: music, mountain, photography, pets, skiing, art, sports…