One of my favorite wines, young or aged. However I find it very difficult to find a vintage chart for Amarone or even the Venato region. Why? Could you help?
Answer From Expert Roger Bohmrich MW
Vintage charts for Amarone are indeed scarce, perhaps in part because this superb Italian wine has not yet entered the realm of most wine collectors...but the appeal of the formidable, velvety, mouth-filling red can only increase in time. Amarone does not benefit from the very long history of some other Italian classics, but it is catching up fast. You might want to look at www.consorziovalpolicella.it, the website of the consortium, which is a fantastic resource about past years, production and many other details (but no vintage chart as such). Wine Enthusiast magazine has a chart available on the internet which includes the Veneto and Amarone specifically. I would not want to take any chart as the literal truth, however, since a single rating for a year can only be a theoretical average of all wines and producers. In the book, Vino Italiano (Bastianich & Lynch), they mention "legendary" vintages in the past such as 1967 and 1976 and more recent "top years" including 1983, 1985, 1988, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998 and 1999. Do you have any of these vintages in your cellar?
