Verona, Valpolicella and the Art of Amarone

Few experiences in Italian travel match the particular pleasure of sitting in a frescoed loggia above a terraced hillside, a glass of aged Amarone in hand, watching the light change on the Valpolicella. This is what we design: access, depth and the unhurried time to absorb both.

Verona rewards those who arrive before the crowds and stay after they leave. In the pale morning light, when the Arena's pink marble is still cool and the Piazza delle Erbe belongs to the market vendors rather than the tour groups, the city reads differently — more ancient, more assured, more genuinely beautiful than any photograph has prepared you for. A UNESCO World Heritage city whose two millennia of continuous inhabitation are legible in every street corner, Verona is the natural starting point for this journey: a civilised, prosperous, art-rich city that happens to sit at the edge of one of Italy's greatest wine territories.

Our private visits begin with the Arena — the first-century Roman amphitheatre that seats fifteen thousand and still feels, from the uppermost rows, intimately scaled — in the early morning with a specialist guide whose knowledge of the building's history covers everything from the gladiatorial games to the Verdi and Puccini productions that have filled it every summer since 1913. The Castelvecchio, the frescoed Mantegna rooms of the church of Sant'Anastasia, the Piazza dei Signori with its Cangrande equestrian statue: Verona is not a city that runs short of things to look at. But eventually, and with a sense of pleasurable inevitability, the road leads northwest, into the hills.

The Valpolicella Classica: A Landscape of Patient Viticulture

The original Valpolicella zone — the strip of terraced hillsides running down from the Lessini mountains toward the Veronese plain, its valleys carved between limestone ridges whose ancient pergola vines still grow above the level of a walking human head — is a place of deliberate restraint. The Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara varieties cultivated here have been grown on these specific terraces since at least the medieval period, and the care with which they are tended — by hand, on slopes that preclude any mechanical intervention — reflects a relationship between viticulturist and site that accumulates across generations into something close to intimacy. We walk these vineyards with the estate owners, stopping at the rows that will become the finest lots of the year, understanding the specific decisions — of harvesting date, of selection in the vineyard, of which bunches will go to the appassimento and which will not — that separate a great Amarone from a competent one.

The Appassimento: Where Amarone Is Made

The defining step in the production of Amarone is the appassimento — the drying of the harvested grapes on bamboo racks in long, shuttered galleries called fruttai, where they rest for a hundred days or more, losing up to thirty-five percent of their weight while their sugars concentrate, their aromatics evolve and a particular beneficial mould, the Botrytis cinerea in its noble form, begins in some years its own transformative work. The fruttai in October and November smell of dried fruit, of spice, of something fermentous and ancient, and to walk through them with the winemaker who is deciding daily whether the drying is proceeding correctly — who lifts a bunch, examines it, smells it, makes a judgment that will shape the eventual wine — is to observe one of the most knowledge-intensive and sensory-dependent decisions in Italian winemaking.

Tasting Amarone Vertically

Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG, fermented to near-dryness from the dried grapes and aged for a minimum of two years in oak — often four, six or more — builds a complexity of dried cherry, dark chocolate, tar, roasted spice and mineral depth that demands patience. Young Amarone is powerful and somewhat reticent; aged Amarone, at ten or fifteen years, reveals a nuance and a length that earn it comparison with the great aged Barolos and Brunellos of Italian viticulture. Our cellar visits are built around vertical tastings of ten to twenty-five years of consecutive vintages, conducted by the winemakers themselves in cellars whose oak barrels and stone walls have been absorbing the specific microclimate of this territory for generations. The purpose is not merely pleasure — though pleasure is considerable — but understanding: of how a vineyard expresses itself differently across the variable seasons of the Veneto climate, and of what patience, in wine as in other things, eventually produces.

The Evening: Opera, Table and Accommodation

Verona's summer Opera Festival, held in the Arena from June to September, is one of the great open-air performance experiences in the world. We reserve the finest boxes and private loges, arrange private dinners at the city's best tables beforehand, and place our guests in historic-centre suites walking distance from the piazza. For those who prefer the quiet of the Valpolicella hills, we access private estates with converted guest quarters, their own cellars and their own sense of the particular peace that comes from sleeping among vines in a landscape that has been cultivated for over a thousand years.

To taste a great Amarone vertically — ten, fifteen, twenty vintages — in the cellar where it was made, with the winemaker who decided each step of its creation, is to understand what Italian wine means at its most serious and its most patient.

The Essentials

Best season: September–November for harvest and appassimento; summer for the Opera Festival

Signature experience: Private vertical Amarone tasting spanning 15–20 vintages with the estate winemaker

Stay: Historic-centre suites in Verona or private converted villa estates in the Valpolicella hills

Combine with: Venice (90 min east) or Lake Garda (30 min west)

Every journey we design is entirely bespoke — crafted around your preferences, your pace, and your desire for the exceptional.

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