Valpolicella Ripasso DOC

Not a place but a technique, given its own denomination in recognition of how much of the Valpolicella hillside it now occupies. The registered file defines it plainly: the traditional ripasso method, of ancient custom in the Valpolicella, consists of re-passing the Valpolicella wine over the skins of Recioto or Amarone. The DOC has been protected since 1968.

How It Works Amarone and Recioto are made from grapes dried for months, and when those wines are drawn off the press their skins still hold sugar, colour, tannin and living yeast. Passing a finished Valpolicella back over that marc restarts a slow secondary fermentation. The wine gains one to two degrees of alcohol, a good deal of colour and extract, and a raisined, chocolate-edged depth it did not have going in. In the Valpolicella this was originally thrift — nothing usable was thrown away — and it has since become the region’s most commercially significant category.

The Terroir The file describes a mild climate producing regular ripening with good sugar and polyphenol levels, and then distinguishes between two bands of hillside. On the low-to-middle slopes, with medium-textured soils, the wines take on very characteristic profiles. The southern and upper hillside zones ripen best and give wines of good extract with fruit and floral character. Highest of all, the marly limestones deliver the strongest phenolic maturity, producing deeply coloured wines with firm tannin over floral and red-fruit notes.

Grape Varieties The Valpolicella blend: Corvina and Corvinone as the backbone, supplying sour cherry, perfume and acidity, with Rondinella for reliability and Molinara where a producer still keeps it. All vinification, ageing and bottling must take place inside the delimited zone.

The Critical Take Ripasso is the most abused category in the Veneto and the most useful when it is done honestly. The technique can add genuine complexity to a wine that would otherwise be simple, and at its best it gives eighty per cent of Amarone’s character at a third of the price. It can equally be used to inflate thin fruit from the valley floor into something superficially impressive and hollow underneath. The tell is balance: a good Ripasso still tastes of sour cherry and still has acidity. If it tastes only of sweetness, oak and alcohol, the marc was doing all the work.

At the Table Roast and braised meat, game, mushroom risotto and aged Monte Veronese. It has the weight for winter cooking that a straight Valpolicella lacks, without the sheer alcohol of Amarone. Serve at 17–18°C and decant a young bottle.

Benchmark Producers Allegrini, Speri, Zenato, Tommasi, Brigaldara.