Wine Farm: Harlequin red wine :

Harlequin is an innovative red wine that is also intimately linked to tradition. It aims to express the soils, the grapes and the people that are part and parcel of a region with a great winemaking culture: the Veneto, in the Northeast of Italy.

In particular, its goal is to be an expression of Verona and of the age-old history of the city of Juliet; of the beauty of its mountains – Baldo and Lessini range – with their infinite vistas; of the verdant hills of Valpolicella, laden with vines and olive trees; of the fertile plain traversed by a great river – the Adige – and of a sky-blue lake that almost seems like a sea: Lake Garda.
Harlequin, Arlecchino: he is the archetypal character of the “commedia dell’arte”. The actor who played him knew the background plot – the essential framework devised by the author – inside out. But then the actor would add his own inspiration, his own mood, his own genius. Improvising in this way, a new comedy was created at each performance. On every occasion new tears would combine with the hearty laughter.

Arlecchino – the crafty but always starving man of the people – was the best loved character. His costume bore the marks if his few but fortunate feasts, stained as it was with the sauce of the gnocchi (or “macaròni”) he had eaten. Harlequin, Arlecchino: this is a dream that became reality in 1999, after years spentin dialogue with the vineyards and after long periods of reflection in the winery, filled with the desire to experiment, understand and acquire knowledge.
My aim is to communicate to other people– through wine – my way of thinking. Here, then is my idea: to trace a clear, neat and precise guideline, grafting into it each year my interpretation of the soil and of Man, of the seasons and of the grapes; and thus to verify in person whether it is possible to produce a wine that expresses in absolute terms my own personal conception of quality, notwithstanding the inconstancy of the climate and of the vintages.
Sometimes sad, sometimes happy; sometimes strog, sometimes gentle; sometimes friendly, sometimes severe; variform and polyhedric – just like Arlecchino’s costume, made up of hundreds of different textiles and colours – yet always recognizable: that is how Harlequin should be. It is a wine made from very many grapes, wich is unique and unrepeatable in every vintage but wich is always recognizable in its kaleidoscopic variability: because it interprets the vineyards, the soil and the culture of its terroir; because it reflects life itself.

Technical data:
Harlequin is produced from many different varieties and from grapes grown in a vast and diverse area. One concept only governs my selection: that of quality. The grapes are picked by hand and each bunch is then dried in small wooden crates for anywhere between five and forty days, in a natural environment, without the aid of fans or dehumidifiers. The grapes are then all pressed together without de-stalking, and fermented in cement vats with indigenous yeasts for 15-20 days. No biotechnological additives are used.
Breaking up the skins, délestages, and especially the human senses of signt, sound and smell: these are the keys to successful fermentation. Our eyes, ears and nose can tell us so much about a wine if only we know how to use them. The wine is then racked and clarification takes place for about ten days before it is filled into new 225-litre barriques, where it remains for at least two and a half years, without undergoing any racking. It is then bottled, without prior fining, and given a minimum of six months’bottle ageing at the winery. It is now time to let it make its appearance in the world, and begin a new life. So here it is now in your hands, in your glass.
Intriguing is perhaps the word that, it seems to me, best sums up this wine. It is a rich ruby red in appearance, without being excessively opaque. It displays purplish reflections and is dense and viscous. The nose offers a gamut of aromas that both succeede and mingle with each other, yielding a whole variety of fruity fragrances, notes redolent of oriental spices, herbal perfumes and scents of chocolate and preserves. The sensations on the palate mirror those of the nose, manifesting complexity, aromatic exuberance, great elegance and length.
The wine fills your mouth with rounded, mineral sensations.

The motive for producing this wine:
A yearning for creativity forms part of my very being, even – perhaps – of my genetic make-up. I wanted to make a wine whose parameters were different to any other. My goal, then, was not to indulge in competition as an end in itself, but simply to express to the utmost degree all that our territory, its grape varieties and the experience.