As I have indicated previously, I like Verona as a city very much.  I have been on a number of occasions, both during Vinitaly, the annual wine trade fair and when it has been a bit calmer.  I love the old centre and am familiar with the wines of the region.  But I had never previously visited producers in the Veneto.  So when a request came in to spend a couple of days in the region doing just that, it didn’t take me long to say, ‘Yes’.

Coffee safely dispatched, it was off to our first stop, Zymé, a newer producer in the region and one that does things a little differently.  The cellar tour was excellent and very informative – we were lucky enough to have Marco, who provided not only a history of the winery but of the region of Veneto and its peoples.  Including an explanation as to why the locals are so unfriendly: his first comment to us as we descended into the cellar was, “I don’t like people” …

I have to say that he covered it well.  As he did the history of the winery and the region.  We got to see the new and the very old – the original caves go back many moons: it was once a sandstone quarry, housed the persecuted during world war 2 and is now home to barrels of maturing wine.  Attention to detail was everywhere.

The tasting, in the purpose-built room with metalwork designed to replicate the veins in a vine leaf, was also very interesting, for Marco challenged us with a blind tasting.  Covering each bottle before pouring the wine, he then asked us what we thought of it, what we would eat with it, was it young or old, even what percentage of their sales we thought it accounted for.  I’ve only ever done one other blind tasting at a winery and out of courtesy for that producer, I will not say where it was, since all the wines were dirty and tasted the same.

This was quite different – the wines were clean, very good and tasted different, for starters – and we tasted 8 samples.  But only 7 wines.  Marco surreptitiously served us wine no. 1 again at the end.  Crafty, but we were alive to it and realised…

This is a producer to visit if you are in the region and love your wines: highly recommended, especially if you can get Marco to show you around.

Following a rather nice lunch at Quinto Quarto, we had another tour and tasting at Tedeschi, a producer with a longer history.  The family has lived and owned vineyards in the village of Pedemonte di Valpolicella since 1630.  (Incidentally, Marco, as part of his extensive tour, explained that the name ‘Valpolicella’ comes from Latin, meaning the ‘valley of many cellars’.  So even a couple of millennia ago, the region was  notable for its wine production.)

Valentina showed us around the historic buildings, gave us a potted history of the family and the winery and then we tried more wines.

We’re doing this so that you don’t have to.  If you decide that you’d like to, however, contact me…

This is my kind of cellar…:

As the map in the header photo shows, Valpolicella is a large region with, perforce, different terroirs.  The tasting at Tedeschi showed clearly the differences in the wines from the different soild types – some heavily volcanic, some alluvial.

Following this second visit it was back to Verona for a break – for myself that meant a pre-prandial at Bottega Vini – before dinner at Tre Marchetti, a wonderful little place just behind the arena.  We found this rather decent bottle of 2009 Amarone at €65.  What’s not to like when the food, setting and company are also so good…?

The following morning dawned at dawn.  And we were off again.  This time to Coffele, a producer located in the heart of the walled, fortified village of Soave.  On this occasion it was just the tasting, in a rather nice tasting room.

Elizabeth went through the differences in the regions and vineyards…

…gave us a generous selection of wines and plied us with some pretty good salami and cheese, too…

An excellent experience, made fun as well as educational by the effervescent Elizabeth!

After a quick, easy lunch at a heaving Osteria Matterana, it was on to the visit I was most looking forward to: Tommaso Bussola.  Let me explain a little.

The grandfather of Amarone and standard-bearer for the region of Valpolicella in the dark days of vast industrial wines was a man called Giuseppe Quintarelli.  Old-school, artisan, fastidious.  In another story relating to my first Vinitaly in 2002, it was at a dinner with clients during this bunfight that we had a bottle of Quintarelli’s 1994 Valpolicella Classico.  Now, 1994 wasn’t the best year in Valpolicella, and back in those days (1990s to 2000s) the reputation of the wine was, as I have said, that of light, industrially-produced alcoholised water.  If an importer wanted a Valpolicella, it was to shift vast quantities to budget Italian restaurants wanting the cheapest, lightest and most insipid house wine they could find.

Yet Mr Quintarelli continued to plough what must have been a lonely furrow – making his Valpolicella to be the best it could be, ageing it for several years before release and asking a high price.  It must have been a difficult sell.  When I drank it all those years ago, I was minded to write to him to thank him for bearing the torch still – for continuing to make something for its own sake, because it was worth making, as opposed to worth money.

These days, of course, his wines are prized by collectors as well as, sometimes, drinkers, with the inevitable result that they now fetch the sort of prices shown below.  Any bottle dating from before Giuseppe’s death in January 2012 is essentially unopenable.

Anyway, some years ago he was asked whom of the next generation below him he regarded highly.  He said only the one name: Tommaso Bussola.  I had had a couple of their wines in the past, but at Christmas in 2023, as I was home with family for 2 weeks, we had a half-bottle of Tommaso Bussola Recioto 1997.  Now Recioto is the antecedent of Amarone: back in the day, the local Veneto tradition was for sweet reds, rather than dry.  Well, of all the wines we had over the Christmas and New Year period, that Recioto was the star.  Amazing wine.  Perfect with the Christmas pudding.

So I was looking forward to visiting them.

…and some diddy tanks for micro-vinifying small, individual parcels.