Amarone families: guarantee of terroir and quality

The generalized and indiscriminate reduction of the yield per hectare from 50 to 45 quintals announced by the Valpolicella Protection Consortium cannot be a good tool to rebalance the distortion between supply and demand in recent years. The application of diversified production parameters is required based on the suitability of the terroir. This is the point of view of the 12 Families of Amarone d'Arte.

"From 2003 to 2011 we went from 5719 hectares of vineyards, of which 2917 in the classic area and 2802 in the doc area, to 7247 hectares of which 3291 in the classic and 3966 in the enlarged area. This has led to a production inversion that sees, today, the enlarged area, dominated by the wineries, prevails over the classic original amarone. In fact, at present the yield of the DOC area exceeds that of the classic area by 10 percentage points: 55% (it was 49% in 2003) against 45% (51% in 2003) ". So Stefano Cesari (Brigaldara), vice president of the Amarone Families, spoke on the topic taken up in recent days by various sector publications. "It is not a question of separating the classic area from the enlarged one - comments Cesari - but of distinguishing between vineyards more or less suited to the production of amarone. Reducing the sorting across and without distinction means encouraging, or in any case not opposing, the overproductive phenomenon that has occurred since 2005/2006, which has led to over 13 million bottles of amarone. In addition to the fact - continues the vice president - that the unitary criterion of reducing the yield from 50 to 45 quintals does not take into account the different incidence of production costs between the hills and the plains ". For the Amarone Families, therefore, the necessary quantitative disincentive policy must be calculated and evaluated, first of all, on the basis of the value of the symbolic wine of Valpolicella, which deserves a repositioning of quality and price. "To do this - concludes Stefano Cesari, vice president of the Amarone d'Arte Families - we propose a strategy of volume containment based on the production terroir, which favors the hills with an increase from 50 to 60% of the yields of grapes from amarone, and penalizes the foothills and plains with yields brought respectively to 40% and 25% ".

Families of Art Amarone : Allegrini, Begali, Brigaldara, Masi, Musella, Nicolis, Speri, Tedeschi, Tenuta Sant'Antonio, Tommasi, Venturini, Zenato