Pietro Clementi "Valpolicella Classico" Veneto, Italy 2023

FROM ROSENTHAL:

THE WINE: A co-fermented field blend representing the entirety of Clementi’s vineyards, the Valpolicella Classico comprises roughly 65% Corvina, 30% Rondinella, and 5% Molinara (plus a tiny amount of Osoleta), typically harvested in mid-September. Fermented via indigenous yeasts in stainless steel, it is bottled in May following harvest after a relatively brief passage in steel—a regimen which emphasizes the brisk, red-fruited, gluggable qualities of wines from this high-altitude sub-Alpine zone.

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.