The Recioto wine

I don’t study history because it’s boring. How many times have we heard this phrase, how many times perhaps, have we said it and repeated it ourselves?But … but, what if we opened a bottle of red, sweet wine and told a different story? Let’s go to Verona, the city of a thousand surprises, and sit down on the banks of the Adige. With his legs dangling on the low wall of Ponte Pietra, goblet in his hand, looking at the Castle of King, Theodoric perched on top of the hill. All we need is to taste the Recioto wine. I have no words; the wine is incredible. It’s good to turn back the hands of the clock and hear it described by Cassiodoro, a senator and prefect at the Court of King Theodoric who was concerned with supplying the royal warehouses with wine. We are in 450 AD. “A fleshy liquid … an edible drink … a pure wine with a regal colour and a special flavour so that you might think that the colour crimson is dyed by the wine itself …”. Back then it was then called Ancinaticum and was the wine of the empire. Most likely in Roman times the current Valpolicella was the main supply area of quality wines, both for Verona and for more distant markets. Today it is produced using the same method of drying the grapes, the Rhaetian grapes from the Veronese countryside. Two thousand years ago they were served at the table as an appetizer before the idea came to do something else with them and thank goodness: Recioto or Vin Santo. The name Recioto arrives in the mid-1800s when the wine is rediscovered. For centuries it had been “hidden” in monasteries and throughout the Middle Ages, the only drinkers were the nobles and the rich who followed the fashion of dry white wine. The origin of this strange name lies in the dialect word “recia” (ear) which indicated the top part of the bunch, the ripest and sweetest part, which was selected during the first harvest for drying. To drink it Veronese style we need “ocio, lengua e recia” (eye, tongue and ear). But why is it a Vin Santo? Let’s ask the patron saint of Verona himself, San Zeno, the Moro bishop, who in 350 AD converted the city to Christianity with the suon di cicchetti, explaining the miracle of the “sun that becomes wine” to the population and emphasising the need to keep the product in barrels for a long time: “ut melius veterascendo reddatur” (so that it gets better with age). No wonder they built a basilica for him in the heart of the city. Curiosity: Recioto is produced with local dried grapes such as Corvina, Corvinone and Rondinella, in smaller percentages also with Forselina, Negrara and Oseleta, and sometimes Molinara. Have you ever heard them? Of course, yes, because the bitter (amaro) son of Recioto, the blood of his blood or wine of his wine, is precisely the famous Amarone (literally “great bitter”). Recioto is a traditional wine that is drunk at Easter and on Easter Monday when the Palio del Recioto takes place in Verona. But I’ll leave you with one tip: take out a piece of chocolate, ideally dark and with red fruits. Then write to me in the comments if you haven’t dreamed and travelled through time.

Emanuele Piva

Max Fletcher