Amarone is Italy's grandest winter red: a dry, powerful wine from the Valpolicella hills of the Veneto, made from grapes left to dry for months before they are pressed, which concentrates everything into something that can touch sixteen percent alcohol without ever feeling clumsy. It is the bottle you reach for when the nights draw in and dinner wants company that can hold its own. Here is what it actually is, how it is made, and why it costs what it does.

So What Exactly Is Amarone?

Start with the place, because Amarone is a wine that could only come from where it does. The Valpolicella is a fan of valleys north of Verona, in the Veneto, the same corner of north-east Italy that gives us Prosecco and Soave. But where those wines are built for lightness, Amarone is built for weight. It is a dry red, made chiefly from three local grapes (Corvina, Corvinone and Rondinella), and it carries the full DOCG stamp, the top tier of Italian wine law. The name is the first clue to its character. Amarone means the bitter one, and after all that ripeness there is a savoury, almost bitter twist on the finish that stops the wine from ever tipping into sweetness. That twist is the whole point. It is what separates Amarone from Recioto, its sweet cousin made in the same cellars from the same dried grapes, with the fermentation halted early to leave the sugar behind.

The Secret Is in the Drying

What makes Amarone Amarone is not the vineyard so much as what happens after the harvest. The best bunches are picked early and then laid out to rest, on bamboo racks or in shallow crates, in the airy lofts the Italians call fruttai. There they sit for the best part of three to four months, through autumn and deep into winter, slowly shrivelling as the water evaporates. By the time they are pressed, usually around the turn of the year, the grapes have lost something like a third of their weight. Everything that remains (sugar, colour, flavour, tannin) is concentrated into far less juice. This is the appassimento, the drying, and it is a slow, nervy, labour-heavy business: a single patch of rot at the wrong moment can cost a whole rack. Only then does fermentation begin, and it is a long one, because there is so much sugar to work through. The wine ferments almost all the way to dryness, which is how you arrive at something around fifteen to sixteen percent alcohol that still tastes savoury rather than sweet. After that comes the wood: at least two years in large oak casks, and often a good deal longer, before a drop is sold.

Why It Costs What It Does

Here is where the price tag starts to make sense. Drying the grapes means giving up volume on purpose. Where a normal red turns a tonne of fruit into a certain number of bottles, Amarone turns that same tonne into far fewer, because so much of it has quite literally gone to the air. Add months of hand-tended drying, the ever-present risk of loss along the way, and years of ageing during which the producer is sitting on stock rather than selling it, and the economics were never going to resemble a midweek bottle of Valpolicella.

It lands at an interesting moment. British drinkers are buying fewer bottles this Christmas but spending more on each one, with the trade reporting that wines above ten pounds are growing several times faster than the market as a whole. Amarone is the wine that argument was built for. One serious bottle on the table does more for an evening than three forgettable ones, and when you understand the work behind it, it is better value than the shelf price first suggests.

Two Bottles from the House That Wrote the Rules

If you want to understand Amarone through a single producer, make it Bertani. They have been working in the Valpolicella since 1857 and making Amarone since the 1930s, which makes them about as close to the grammar of the style as anyone alive. Their Valpantena 2022 is the friendlier way in. It comes from a narrow side valley to the east of the Classico heartland, where the slopes lend a little more perfume and a little less brute force. Expect very ripe cherry and blackberry, dried rose and a dusting of cinnamon and black pepper, soft and creamy on the palate with that trademark bitter-savoury snap on the close. At around forty-four pounds it is a proper Amarone without the ceremony, and it is drinking beautifully now.

The Classico 2015 is the other end of the telescope. Bertani held it back for the best part of a decade, releasing it only in 2024 after seven to eight years in big Slavonian oak. Decanter gave it ninety-seven points and called it a masterclass in harmony, and you can taste why: dried red fruits, dark chocolate and cigar box on the nose, fine filigree tannins, a line of acidity that keeps all that richness airborne rather than heavy. This is a bottle for the night that matters, and it will hold for another decade yet if you can keep your hands off it.

Between them, those two bottles tell the whole story. One is Amarone as a weeknight luxury, the other as an occasion in a glass. Keep the Valpantena for a cold Tuesday with something braised, and put the Classico away for Christmas itself.

How to Serve It, and What to Put Beside It

Treat Amarone with a little respect and it pays you back. Serve it at around sixteen to eighteen degrees, cool cellar rather than warm room, in a large bowled glass that gives all that aroma somewhere to go. Decant it an hour or two ahead, both to let it open up and to leave any sediment behind in an older bottle. And because it carries real alcohol, pour smaller measures than instinct suggests; this is a wine to sip and consider, not to swig. At the table it wants food with weight to match. Braised beef in Amarone is the Veronese answer and almost impossible to beat, but osso buco, venison or anything slow-cooked and savoury will do the job. After dinner it turns to cheese, and a wedge of well-aged Parmigiano against all that dried fruit is one of the great cold-weather pairings. If it leaves you hungry for more big reds, our guides to Barolo and Tuscan reds are the natural next pours, and for the rich side of France there is always Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

The Bottle for the Long Night

There is a certain kind of winter evening that Amarone was made for. The curtains are drawn, something is in the oven, and nobody is in any hurry. It is not a wine for a crowd or a quick glass before the train. It is a wine for the end of the table and the end of the year, for slowing everything down. Open one on the coldest night you can find, pour it small, and let it do what dried grapes and a great deal of patience have always done. Few bottles reward the wait quite so generously.