Good morning all,

Simon’s Wine of the Week is Villalta Ripasso Della Valpolicella

One of the joys of being the Wine Development Manager is tasting wines with lots of different customers. It’s always fascinating when people try a wine for the first time, particularly when they instantly fall in love with it and you know this is going to be one of their favourites. I tasted this Valpolicella again yesterday whilst doing some wine training for some staff and it went down an absolute storm, even with a few people who had professed that they didn’t really like red wine.

Valpolicella Ripasso comes from Northern Italy, to the East of the shores of Lake Garda. It’s one of those wines that lots of people have heard of but fewer seem to have tried. The wine is made up of a blend of local grape varieties that include Corvina, Rondinella, Molinara, and Corvinone, which are grown pretty much exclusively in this part of the world. Most Valpolicella is made to be a nice, fresh, easy drinking red that is drunk young, but there is a lot more to it than that. There a different quality levels when it comes to Valpolicella, and a little knowledge does indeed go a long way.

At the top of the tree is Amarone della Valpolicella, expensive and very alcoholic. It is made with grapes that are harvested late, so they are super ripe. These grapes are then taken to temperature and humidity controlled drying racks where they are partially dried. This process concentrates the flavours, the body, and the sugars of the grape juice. When this juice is fermented it makes a massively full-bodied wine that can have very high alcohol levels. I once had a bottle at a staggering 16.5%. Drink slowly.

Sitting next to Amarone is Recioto della Valpolicella, less well known but actually the original style of this type of wine. Made with the same dried grapes as Amarone, here the fermentation stops before all the sugar turns to alcohol, so you have a less alcoholic wine, but it is sweet. It is one of the world’s great red dessert wines and deserves to be tasted.

Below that you have Valpolicella Classico, wines from the original hilly vineyard area, where the grapes can ripen better. Look out for a Classico wine labelled Superiore as these wines have to be aged for 1 year before release, with a lot of producers ageing their wines in oak to give more complexity and softness.

Valpolicella Ripasso wines, of which this week’s wine is one, sort of sit in between Amarone and Classico wines. The word Ripasso refers to the winemaking process that gives these wines their unique style. Ripasso literally means ‘Repassed’ and this process involves adding the grape skins from the Amarone wine to a normal Valpolicella wine, and refermenting them together. This refermentation adds body, flavour and alcohol to the wine, and gives it some of that ‘raisiny’ Amarone character without busting the wallet.

Villalta’s Ripasso Valpolicella is a great autumnal wine, with big, in your face, rich dried fruit, raisin, plum jam, liquorice, and black pepper on the nose. As you would expect there’s a lot going on with the full-bodied palate. There’s more of that classic dried fruit and raisin, dark cherry, plum, vanilla and sweet spice. It is the taste of leaves exploding into vibrant reds, oranges, and yellows, the crisp evening air, and woodsmoke wafting in the low morning sun.

Drink this with autumnal food, think chestnut and wild mushroom risotto, slow cooked pork with apple, or a really good game pie.

Have a great week all,

Simon