Harlequin 2016
Falstaff 95
Wine Description
Harlequin is Zymè's grand experiment and its most sought after bottle outside Amarone: a Veneto IGP red drawn from a minimum of fifteen grape varieties, red and white, grown across the estate's patchwork of parcels. Like the harlequin of the commedia dell'arte it wears many colours stitched into one costume, and Gaspari treats it as a single vineyard of many voices, fermented and raised with the patience the house applies to its Amarone.
The 2016 is dense and finely woven: black cherry, mulberry and plum over pepper, tobacco and dark chocolate, the tannins ripe and the finish long and spiced, with new detail surfacing as the wine breathes. It is drinking beautifully now and built to continue. Decant for an hour or two and serve at 18 °C with roast duck, braised venison, or aged mountain cheeses; a bottle for tables that like to talk about what is in the glass.
Winery
Zymè is the project of Celestino Gaspari, who learned winemaking at the side of Giuseppe Quintarelli, his father in law, before starting his own label in 1999. The cellar sits at Mattonara in San Pietro in Cariano, built into a sandstone quarry worked since the fifteenth century, and draws on about 30 hectares scattered across the Valpolicella Classica, the Soave and Durello hills and the Colli Berici. The name is Greek for yeast, a nod to ferment and transformation, and the wines follow suit: native grapes, patient aging and around 150,000 bottles a year across a broad range.
