Valpolicella History
In Valpolicella the bond between grapevines and territory has ancient origins. The most ancient proof of the cultivation of grapevines dates back to the fifth century BC for the discovery, in the pre-Roman village of Archi di Castelrotto, of numerous wine grape seeds.
According to historians the name “Valpolicella” comes from the Latin “Vallis-polis-cellae” which means “Valley of the many cellars".
A theory that is also supported by the fact that the wines that we actually know, Valpolicella, Amarone and Recioto, are indicated as descendents of the Roman “retico”- the old Roman name for wine.
The name of Vitis raetica derives from the toponym Raetia, a region that from the Danube stretched, in Roman times, to the canton of Graubunden (in Switzerland) and included Tyrol and Lombardy up to Verona. There are numerous authors that mention the grapes and wine of these vineyards:
Around the middle of the second century B.C. Canton praised the retica grape while Suetonius, speaking of the private life of the emperor, said that that he particularly enjoyed “retico wine” . Martial who saved it, perhaps for ageing, in an amphora, reported the origins of the lands of ductus Catullo and therefore from Verona.
The most beautiful praise for the Veronese wine is that written by Cassidoro (490-593 AD), magister officiorum under Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, who in a letter describes a wine made with a special drying technique, then called Acinatico, a name deriving from grape (Acinaticum, cui nomen ex acino est, …), produced in the territory called Valipolicella.
“.. red like purple or white like fragrant lilies, stately and thick…. Pure wine of the royal colour and special tastes, as if the purple is coloured by the wine itself or that it's clear spirit is wrung out by the purple... the sweetness of it is felt with incredible suave, it affirms the density for I do not know what backbone, and swells when touched in a manner that one would say it is a meaty liquid, or a drink to eat from…”
Any doubts that that this is a close relative of the actual Recioto vanishes when, again from the same Latin prose of Cassidoro, we also learn the production methods of this straw wine: “ The grapes chosen in autumn in the household pergola vines are hung upside down and stored in their natural containers. Withering away, not corrupted by old age, and oozing out the bland mood it sweetens with great suave. Stored until the month of December, when the winter season has completed the drying, and in awesome manner there is new wine in the cellar while in all the others one comes across a wine that is old” Excavations near the Roman villa (II-III century A.D.) in Ambrosan, between S.Pietro in Cariano and Fumane, discovered some rooms equipped with a heating system under the floor (hypocaust) reserved for drying grapes used for making Retico wine. This is a confirmation that the drying technique was already widespread among the Romans.
Also the Lombard King Rotari, in the famous Edict of 643 AD, for a good five times legislated the need to protect the vines and the cultivation of these. Countless in the centuries are the citations and praise for this land and its wines. Scipione Maffei (1675-1755) describes in the opera “Verona illustrata” the wine making techniques of dried grapes and describes the wine obtained as “bitter”, which testifies to the etymological root of “amarone”(coming from the word bitter in Italian). We continue to remember Giseppe Beretta, Veronese writer from Verona in 1800, Bertor Barbarani, one of the most famous Veronese poets at the beginning of the twentieth century, and finally the journalist and historian Joseph Silvestri.
