VALPOLICELLA DOP Classico Superiore 2005
Wine Description
Quintarelli's Valpolicella Classico Superiore is many collectors' idea of the best value in the cellar at Negrar, an everyday appellation treated with the patience most houses reserve for Amarone.
A large share of the grapes, Corvina and Corvinone with Rondinella and small traditional varieties, is dried before pressing, and the wine then rests for years in old botti, around six in vintages we have followed, so each release arrives with bottle age already built in.
It tastes like a junior Amarone with better manners: ripe morello cherry, dried plum, tobacco, cocoa and balsamic herbs on a silky, medium full frame.
The 2005 is at a mature stage, its fruit shading into fig and leather.
Serve at 16 to 18 °C with a short decant. In Venice we pour it with fegato alla veneziana; it is equally right with bigoli with duck ragù or roast pork.
Winery
Giuseppe Quintarelli, the quiet master of Valpolicella, ran his family's hillside estate at Negrar from 1950 until his death in 2012 and set a standard the region still measures itself against. His daughter Fiorenza and her family keep the cellar exactly as he left it: about eleven hectares of vines, long natural drying of the grapes, slow fermentations and years of rest in large old botti, with every wine released only when the family judges it ready. Production stays near sixty thousand bottles a year, and the famous handwritten labels still leave the estate at their own unhurried pace.
