Ripasso: What the Skins Still Hold
Not long ago I was having dinner at one of the old institutions of San Zeno in Verona. On the table was a Ripasso from Secondo Marco, Marco Speri's estate in Fumane, and over dinner I told my companion a story about it.
He already knew the saying I started with. Anyone who has spent time in the Veneto has heard some version of it: del màs-cio no se buta via gnente. From the pig, nothing is thrown away. What surprised him was that it had anything to do with the wine in front of him. He wanted to know how hard circumstances could shape a culture, and how that culture could shape the way people made wine.
So I told him about the countryside around us, which visitors tend to picture as it looks today, all villas, pergolas and comfortable cellars. For most of its history it was nothing of the kind. In 1630, plague killed more than six in ten people in Verona. Armies crossed this territory again and again: Napoleon fought at Arcole and Rivoli, and the wars of Italian independence were fought at Custoza, a short drive from the city. Through much of the nineteenth century the poorest families lived almost entirely on polenta, and pellagra, the disease that follows such a diet, spread through the Veneto countryside. Valpolicella itself emptied out. Around 1900 its hill district, which includes Fumane, where the wine on our table was made, was sending more than a thousand people a year across the Alps to find work.
People who live like that for generations stop wasting things, and nobody needs to tell them to. The habit settles into the kitchen and the proverbs, and eventually into the cellar.
He asked, more than once, whether I tell this story in public. I had the impression he tasted the wine differently by the end.
So here it is.
Ripasso begins in winter. The grapes for Amarone spend months drying in the fruttaio, the airy lofts above the cellars, and are pressed from December onwards. Once that wine has been drawn off, the skins left behind are far from exhausted. They still hold colour, tannin, some unfermented sugar and the concentration of grapes that have lost much of their water. Producers put Valpolicella from the autumn harvest back over them and let it ferment again. At Secondo Marco the wine stays on the Amarone skins for about ten days, then rests for a long time in large casks. What comes out, the Ripasso wine, sits between the two wines it borrows from.
Hardship explains the habit. How the habit reached the wine is a more varied story than I once told, and the best guide I know to it is the historian Andrea Brugnoli, in his chapter on Ripasso in Verona illustrata a tavola. He starts in 1841 with Giuseppe Beretta, who gave precise instructions, writing in Verona, for reusing the pressed skins of grapes that had made fine dried-grape wines. You beat them in a tub with a knotty stick and soften them with a little boiling must. Then you pour over ordinary white wine and wait two or three days for "some distant sign of fermentation". By the middle of the nineteenth century, Brugnoli concludes, using the residues of a passito to revive another wine was common practice around Verona.
Earlier still, on the estates of the monastery of Santa Maria in Organo, Peter Musgrave's research found a vino ripassato, made by passing the previous year's wine through the pressed berries of the new harvest. It gained value, yet it still sold for less than new wine. It was a way of rescuing a wine that would not otherwise have kept.
In the farmhouses, the proverb applied in full. They often sold the real wine for cash. What they drank was vinello: pressed skins revived with water, sometimes with poor fruit added, fermented into something barely alcoholic. In the hills, an agrarian inquiry of the late nineteenth century counted around half a litre a day of it per person. Real wine, another half litre, came on Sunday.
These are three different practices, and I would not draw a straight line from any of them to the bottle on our table. What they share is an attitude: what remains after the first use may still hold value. Brugnoli describes Veronese tradition as an exchange between learned experiment and popular habit, and Ripasso grew from both.
The modern wine has a clearer starting point. Masi released the first Campofiorin in 1964, refermenting Valpolicella on Amarone skins, and for a time held Ripasso as a trademark. The style spread, became one of the region's commercial successes, and received its own appellation, the DOC, from the 2010 harvest. Commerce gave the gesture a name and a market. The gesture itself was much older.
That history rarely reaches the glass. Ripasso is usually explained as a technique, sold as "baby Amarone", or left as a puzzle beside Valpolicella Superiore on a wine list. Both promise more than a basic Valpolicella: one through riper fruit and longer ageing, the other through a second pass over Amarone skins. Wine usually reaches us explained through soil, slope, climate, grape and, all too often, cellar techniques. We talk far less about the way a wine can carry a culture: a way of living, and an attitude towards what a harvest gives. Ripasso is one of the clearest cases I know, a cultural artefact of this place that you can drink.
It also has to be good. I like Ripasso near the middle of its bridge, with enough body and depth from the Amarone skins and Valpolicella's freshness still intact, the whole thing in balance. Examples that lean too far towards either end convince me less. That evening, the Secondo Marco sat close to that point. Sour cherry came first, then something darker underneath. It had the ethereal quality I like in a wine lifted by its freshness, yet also a chewy, savoury depth that comes from its time on the Amarone skins. If you are in Verona, order one at an old trattoria table and ask for a bottle that keeps its freshness.
My companion may not remember Beretta's knotty stick, the monks or the Sunday half litre. I hope he remembers that the wine in his glass came from a long habit of looking twice at what was left.
Del màs-cio no se buta via gnente.
Photo Marx Anderson