This celebrated vineyard-designate Valpolicella Superiore opens with huge, dark intensity and boldly concentrated aromas of dark fruit, spice and bitter chocolate. The tannins are very astringent at this point and the wine needs more years of cellar aging before it softens. ——M.L.(12/1/2011)—— 93

The 1998 Amarone della Valpolicella Vigneto di Monte Lodoletta is a supreme example of this wine, almost overwhelming in its aromatic impact, luxuriously sweet, ripe, jammy, and chocolatey, mouthfilling and powerful in flavor, broad and caressing, solid and sustained from the attack to the lengthy, lingering finish, superbly shaped and balanced, pedal to the floor power and shapely elegance all in one package. The score is probably too conservative, but it can easily be checked over the next 25 years. Importer: Vias Imports, New York, NY; tel. (212) 629-0200

This wine has taken a beautiful turn, but sadly only 17 bottles still exist back at the winery. The 1996 Amarone della Valpolicella Vigneto di Monte Lodoletta exhibits beautiful linearity and freshness that is almost unreal to behold considering the massive texture and weight of the fruit flavors on hand. The fruit is still plump and vibrant, and the 17.5% alcoholic content is magically downplayed. To be honest, in a blind tasting I might guess this wine is five to ten years younger than it really is. That freshness, both in terms of fruit and mouthfeel, is really quite extraordinary. This wine is going nowhere fast, but in a good way, because it is pretty much ageless. Delicate notes of exotic spice and fine licorice appear as pretty accents on the close. There is no doubt: This is one of the greatest Amarone wines ever made, and it is still holding strong.

When Robert M. Parker Jr. first reviewed this wine back in 1997, he wrote: "Full-bodied, powerful and rich, with no hard edges, this is a heady, sensationally endowed wine that should drink well for 15 years. Wow! An amazing wine." Today, I am tasting this wine more than 20 years after those words were published, and the 1990 Amarone della Valpolicella Vigneto di Monte Lodoletta is still holding on, albeit tenuously. In Mr. Parker's original review, he described the wine as "massively proportioned," and perhaps that is the key point of his review that no longer applies. This wine has thinned out and become more subdued over these three decades since the harvest, bringing delicate aromas of smoke, tar, dried tobacco leaves, graphite and crushed stone to the forefront of the bouquet. The mouthfeel is more streamlined, and we noticed that it took our bottle quite a while before those aromas started to reveal themselves. Our sample started closed, but it did open shyly with time. We considered opening a second bottle to confirm our impressions, but alas, none are left at the winery. My conclusion is that the wine is thinning out, and although our bottle may not have been perfect, there is enough energy here to reasonably extend its drinking window just a little longer.

The 1988 Recioto is a mindboggling effort from Dal Forno Romano. After the grapes were air-dried for six months on straw mats, this wine was aged three years in 100% new French oak casks. Although outrageously expensive, it represents the essence of this style of wine. It is off-dry rather than sweet, with a dark garnet color, and a nose of smoke, prunes, over-ripe plums, hickory wood, and chocolate. Extremely full-bodied and exceptionally rich, with some residual sugar, this wine has been blazingly well-defined by its sojourn in new oak casks. Remarkably, the wine has soaked up its eighteen months in new oak as there is not a hint of vanillin or pain grille notes in either its aromas or flavors. This legendary Recioto should drink well for 2-3 decades.Readers who follow the Italian wine scene must argue incessantly over who makes the greatest wines of Veneto - Quintarelli or Dal Forno Romano? Both are at the top of their game, producing spectacular wines that are reference points for an area of northeast Italy that is beginning to show signs of awakening from a long period of moribund mediocrity.Importer: Vias Imports, New York, NY; tel. (212) 629-0200