Cantina Valpolicella Negrar

Since 2016, the cellar and the cooperative

The cellar decisions sit with Daniele Accordini, enologist and general manager at Cantina Valpolicella Negrar in Valpolicella Classica, Negrar, Italy. He began this phase of his career in 2016 as director and winemaker, then carried the work into his present double post at Cantina Valpolicella Negrar and Domìni Veneti. The role is not only a matter of tasting from barrel. It asks him to hold a house style across a cooperative founded in 1933, with more than 230 grower members farming around 700 hectares across the Valpolicella Classica hillsides. That scale changes the nature of the bench. Accordini works between cellar, growers, and the explanation of the wines themselves, a discipline that widened in 2021 when he became wine educator and narrator in a Domìni Veneti tasting video. The house began with seven gentlemen from Verona and kept the cooperative form as its working structure. In this setting, lineage is carried less through a single family name than through member families, vineyard parcels, and the repeated agreement to make Corvina, Corvinone, Rondinella, and Molinara speak with a recognizable hand.

Appassimento measured in altitude and days

The method here starts before the drying room, with the choice of vineyard and training system. Accordini has described one wine as beginning with grapes from 20-25-year-old vineyards, set between 200 and 250 metres above sea level, trained by double pergola, grassed, and irrigated by drip irrigation. Elsewhere in the cooperative, vineyards rise between 200 and 500 meters, which gives the cellar a broad range of exposures to read. For Amarone, the work turns on appassimento: grapes picked between September and October, by hand, then air-dried until December or January. Certain premium selections, including Acinatico, can dry up to 120 days. The point is concentration, not excess. After drying, the grapes are selected again and softly crushed. The cellar then moves through fermentation and élevage, including 225 hl and 50 hl French new oak barrels for 18 months, followed by 6 months in bottle. Accordini’s own language around a lighter Valpolicella Classico stays practical: colour, alcohol at 11.5 degrees, and structure.

The cellar, the caveau, the tasting room

The place carries its history in working rooms rather than display alone. The appassimento museum explains the drying of grapes as a physical craft, close to the racks, the air, and the slow loss of water that changes the fruit’s purpose. The Historic Barrel room holds the aging program in view, with the scale of a cooperative cellar made legible by wood, time, and repeated topping up. In the Reserve caveau, the archive keeps older bottles as a record of the house’s decisions. Tastings here are built to teach the land through the glass, not to detach the wine from its hillsides. The room remains conversational, professional, and directed toward Valpolicella Classico, Ripasso, and Amarone.

A first Amarone in the house record

Cantina Valpolicella Negrar’s claim on Amarone is specific: in 1936, three years after its founding, the cooperative bottled the first Amarone Extra label. That fact still gives the cellar its center of gravity. The house does not need to make Amarone a museum piece; its present work depends on keeping the method active across growers, vineyards, barrel rooms, and the Domìni Veneti line. The wine that keeps returning to the bench is Amarone Extra.