2021 Tutela Amarone della Valpolicella 750 ml

Opening a great bottle of Amarone is an experience akin to sitting down to a three-hour Fellini flick or digging into a butter-soft osso buco that’s simmered all day. It’s a wine that captures the grandiosity and epic quality of the Italian spirit.

The sumptuous 2021 Tutela Amarone della Valpolicella—made by Antiche Terre, the source of our #1 best-selling Amarone of all time—is rooted in an older time. From a hallowed 125-year-old estate, fashioned by the traditional months-long appassimento process, there’s no shortcut to attaining this level of glossy, palate-coating, mellow richness in the glass.

When it comes to this ultra-traditional Venetian style, centuries of wisdom have boiled down to this: Harvest grapes in the fall, then leave them alone. Let the cool autumn winds off the Lessini mountains do their work, gradually drying the grapes till they’ve shrunk to almost half their weight, leaving grape skins, seeds, and pulp supercharged with polyphenols and glycerin.

Let Old Man Winter slow the pace of fermentation to a crawl, then allow for another languorous spell in old barrels, as miniscule amounts of oxygen and wood flavor eke into the wine over the course of years. It’s a long, drawn-out process that could never have originated in our modern-day era of TikTok attention spans. It took patience and a precise understanding of the seasons.

When you’re talking about a process as labor-intensive as this, it’s no wonder that most top Amarones command three-figure prices. We’ve always kept an eye out for the best deals, thanks to a large and vocal contingent of Amarone fans among our members. We were thrilled to find this one.