Pietro Clementi "Amarone della Valpolicella" Veneto, Italy 2015

FROM ROSENTHAL:

THE WINE: A blend of Corvina, Corvinone, Rondinella, and Molinara. Clementi’s remarkably vibrant, layered Amarone comes from bunches picked in mid-September and dried in shallow wooden crates in a naturally ventilated room of the winery until they lose 40 to 50% of their original water weight—which takes until the following January or February. At that point, the shriveled grapes are pressed and fermented via naturally occurring yeasts (a rarity for Amarone, as its high sugar levels have difficulty fermenting all the way through without outside assistance), and the wine spends five years in 30-hectoliter casks followed by three years in bottle before reaching the market. Clementi’s is an Amarone of tension and freshness, tasting not only of dried red fruits and chocolate, but of salt and spice. Powerful without being hefty, and fully, mouthwateringly dry, it is built for the long haul, and will continue to develop complexity and depth over three decades or more of bottle aging.

THE PRODUCER: Clementi produces wine in a non-flashy, traditional style—a style that speaks of the inherent acidity and freshness obtainable in Valpolicella’s high-altitude slopes of sandy chalk. When embraced rather than combatted, this freshness engenders wines of balance and drinkability even among elevated alcohol levels and appassimento-derived gustatory elements. Pietro has always tried to produce the kind of Valpolicella wine he grew up with, resisting trends in the 1990s toward richness, extraction, and new-oak presence—trends which dog the zone’s reputation in certain circles to this day. In that vein, he and his children employ natural fermentations (assisted by pied de cuve if necessary), natural clarifications without fining or filtering, and pointedly long aging for their Amarone.

In Clementi’s wines one feels a reassuring lack of artifice—an absence of polish which makes them feel right at home in RWM’s family of growers. With their resonant minerality, their bracing acidity, and their lack of excess flesh, they reveal what this often-misunderstood winegrowing area is capable of when its human stewards possess the wisdom to allow the land to speak in as plain a voice as possible.