What makes Quintarelli the benchmark for Amarone?

Patience and refusal, mostly. Bepi Quintarelli dried his grapes longer, aged the wine for years in big old Slavonian oak, and released an Amarone only in vintages he judged worthy — declassifying the rest rather than putting his name on something merely good. The result is Amarone at its most complete and long-lived, and the wine every other producer in Valpolicella quietly measures themselves against. It set the ceiling for the whole appellation.

Can you visit Giuseppe Quintarelli?

Not in any walk-in sense. This is a private, famously reserved family estate in the hills above Negrar, not a cellar door with a tasting room and a sign on the road — production is tiny, the wines are allocated, and hospitality has never been the point. Don't build a Valpolicella day around getting through the gate. If you want to meet this house, the reliable route is a bottle, not a booking.

What is Rosso del Bepi?

It's the smart drinker's secret. In vintages when the Amarone isn't declared, the fruit that would have gone into it is bottled instead as Rosso del Bepi — named for Giuseppe himself. Same hillsides, same hands, a step down in ambition and price, and far easier to find and to open young. If you want to taste the Quintarelli signature without chasing the flagship, this is the way in.

Which grapes go into Quintarelli's wines?

The backbone is the Valpolicella trio — Corvina and Corvinone with Rondinella — the same grapes behind every Amarone. But the estate also plants international and Italian varieties like Cabernet and Nebbiolo, which turn up in blends such as Ca' del Merlo and, dried appassimento-style, in the rare Cabernet-based Alzero. It's a traditional house that quietly does its own thing at the edges.

Giuseppe Quintarelli

Ask any Amarone producer in Valpolicella who they measure themselves against, and eventually you'll get the same name. This one.

Giuseppe Quintarelli — Bepi to everyone — made his wine in the hills above Negrar, in the heart of the Veneto, and he did it slower and more stubbornly than anyone around him. The bottles came out with labels that looked handwritten because for years they essentially were. Inside was Amarone taken to its absolute limit: grapes dried for months, wine aged for years in big old Slavonian oak, and — the part that made the legend — released only in vintages Bepi personally judged worthy of his name. The rest he declassified rather than compromise. That single act of refusal is why this is the reference point for the entire appellation.

The man who set the ceiling

Bepi died in 2012, and the wine world stopped for a moment. He'd spent a lifetime doing the opposite of what the market wanted — no shortcuts, no scaling up, no chasing scores — and had somehow become the most sought-after name in Veneto by ignoring all of it. The estate carries on in the family's hands, on the same ground, to the same brief: change nothing that matters.

And what matters here is time. Amarone is made everywhere in Valpolicella now, much of it slick and modern. Quintarelli's is made as if the last fifty years of cellar technology never happened — long appassimento in the drying lofts, long slumber in cask, no rush to bottle and no rush to sell. Where others aim for polish, Bepi aimed for completeness. His Amarone can be austere and brooding on release and then run for decades, unfolding into dried cherry, fig, tobacco, walnut and sweet spice without ever tipping into the jammy heaviness that sinks lesser versions.

Most estates make the best Amarone they can every year. Quintarelli only makes Amarone in the years it can be great — and bottles the rest under another name.

The wines

Short, deep, and ranked by patience rather than marketing.

Start with Primofiore if you want the house without the ceremony. It's the young red — Corvina and Corvinone with a little Cabernet — bottled early, drinkable now, and it carries the estate's savoury, structured signature at a fraction of the wait. The honest front door.

The one the insiders actually chase for value is Rosso del Bepi. In vintages when the Amarone isn't declared, the fruit that would have become it is bottled here instead, under Giuseppe's own nickname. Same hillsides, same hands, a notch down in power and far easier to find. It is, in the most literal sense, declassified Quintarelli Amarone. Buy it when you see it.

The Amarone della Valpolicella Classico is the wine that built everything else. Made from Corvina, Corvinone and Rondinella dried into concentration, fermented bone-dry, and aged until it's ready and not a day before. In the greatest years there's a Riserva as well — rarer still, longer-aged, the estate at full stretch. These are the bottles behind the auction results and the hushed tones, and they reward a decade in the cellar the way almost nothing else from Italy does.

Then the outliers, for when you've fallen all the way in: the sweet Recioto, Amarone's ancestor and the region's oldest wine; Alzero, a rare Cabernet-based wine made by the same drying method; and small quantities of white. None of them ordinary. All of them unmistakably from here.

The setting

The estate sits in the Valpolicella Classica zone, on the higher slopes above Negrar where the marl-and-limestone hills and cooler air give the grapes the acidity and structure that let a wine this powerful still feel lifted. Up in the drying lofts — the fruttai — the harvested bunches rest for months, losing water and gaining everything else, before they ever see a press. It's an unhurried, almost monastic operation, more workshop than winery, and the antithesis of a modern estate built for footfall.

Visiting

Here's the honest answer: you mostly can't, and you shouldn't plan around trying. Quintarelli is a private, deeply reserved house — production is tiny, the wines are allocated, and the family has never traded on hospitality. There's no walk-in tasting room waiting to receive you, no sign luring you off the road. This is one of the rare great estates where the wine is the only public face it has.

So don't structure a Valpolicella trip around the gate. Structure it around the region — Negrar and its neighbouring villages, the drying lofts you can see at other estates, a table where a mature Amarone is on the list — and treat a bottle of Quintarelli as the thing you bring home, not the thing you book. Confirm the current policy before you assume anything; but assume, for planning, that the answer is the bottle.

What to buy

Match the bottle to your patience. If you want the estate at its greatest and you have years to wait, the Amarone della Valpolicella Classico — a Riserva when the vintage gave one — is the whole argument in a glass. If you want the signature without the hunt, Rosso del Bepi is the connoisseur's shortcut: the same house, the same soul, far easier to reach. And if you just want to see what the fuss is about tonight, Primofiore is the young, welcoming, unmistakably-Quintarelli place to begin.