Verona has dried grapes for wine since antiquity: in the sixth century Cassiodorus, minister at the Ostrogothic court, praised the Acinatico made from raisined berries. Amarone keeps the method — corvina and its companions laid on racks to shrivel through appassimento for a hundred days and more — but ferments the concentrated must fully dry.
The result, so the story goes, was an accident: a barrel of sweet recioto left to ferment too far, and a cellarman's verdict — amarone, "the great bitter one". The name first appears in 1936; the style conquered the world after the war. Dried cherry, fig and cocoa, velvet weight at sixteen degrees: a dry wine that keeps the memory of a sweet one.