Pietro Clementi, Valpolicella Classico, Veneto, Italy 2025

65% Corvina, 30% Rondinella, 5% Molinara and Osoleta

A co-fermented field blend representing the entirety of Clementi’s vineyards, the Valpolicella Classico is fermented via indigenous yeasts in stainless steel, and later bottled after a relatively brief passage in steel. This regimen emphasizes the brisk, red-fruited, gluggable qualities of wines from this high-altitude sub-Alpine zone.

In 1969, Pietro Clementi, the then-mayor of Marano, purchased the Gnirega estate and its 20 hectares of vineyards and woodlands. Pietro spent his formative years among the vines, and he aimed to produce in a non-flashy, traditional style, representing the inherent acidity and freshness obtainable in these high-altitude slopes of sandy chalk.

In Clementi's wines one feels a reassuring lack of artifice. 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.