Romano dal Forno was born in 1957, the only son of a family of small vineyard owners in the valley of Ilasi, in the east of Valpolicella.
Like many families in the valley, the Dal Fornos had always produced wine for their own use and sold the bulk of their grapes to the local cooperative. Romano was the first to bottle and sell wine under his own name.
When I first met Romano towards the end of the 1980s, we spoke at the kitchen table of his family home.
A flight of rickety steps led from the kitchen to the tiny underground cellar where Romano’s entire production was ageing in traditional casks.
A single light bulb dangled from the ceiling of the cellar – the scene was one which you would have found in the homes of countryside families the length and breadth of Italy in those days.
Passing in front of the Azienda Agricola Romano dal Forno today, the company headquarters could easily be mistaken for a rather grand 17th-century Venetian villa from the outside.
The architecture, along with the decor of the reception areas are of the era, however the grape-drying and vinification facilities are high-tech, with an array of equipment designed to the company’s own specifications.
The cellars go down three levels, and the vaulted barrique cellar alone extends for an area of 1,392m2.
Valpolicella’s best-kept secret
The vineyard area has grown from the original 7.5 hectares to 35ha, and production from 5,000 bottles a year to an average of 50,000.
The wines – which for most of the 1980s were Valpolicella’s best-kept secret – today enjoy iconic status.
The transformation of the azienda has something of a fairytale story about it, and in fact Romano himself says: ‘Sometimes, when I’m on my own in the winery, I wander around and I think to myself, how on earth did I manage all this?’
Romano made his first official vintage in 1983. He was 26 years old and recently married.
Bursting with energy, he was idealistic and galvanised by the dream of making quality wine. But breaking with the local cooperative was a giant step.
When Romano told his father he wanted to start his own production, his father took it badly. Where was the sense in setting up in competition with the cooperatives?
In the end his father acquiesced, but looking back now, Romano has to admit that he was right to be sceptical.
‘In the 1980s, the word “quality” did not exist in the Italian language. You had to produce quantity to get ahead’.
Learning from a legend
It was about that same time that Romano met Giuseppe Quintarelli, with whom he formed a lasting relationship.
The legendary Amarone producer was an inspirational figure for Romano, but when it came to making wine, he was determined to do it his way.
‘I didn’t want to be a copy of Quintarelli… I wanted to stand on my own two feet’, he says, continuing, ‘Giuseppe always used to say, “We have always made wine the way tradition commanded, and how it always has been”, but that jarred with me’.
Romano could not relate to a tradition that was not a part of him, but there was one instance at the start of his career when following Quintarelli’s advice proved to be a game-changer.
Quintarelli had suggested that Romano thin out the crop, which he did – not by removing whole bunches, but by cutting away the bottom of the bunch to leave only the wings, known as the ‘ears’.
‘I saw immediately that this was a good thing to do, but also very risky,’ he recalls. ‘The results were great when the weather held, but in years when it rained it was a disaster’.
Despite the risks, with this extremely rigid selection using only tiny bunches of the very best fruit, Romano was able to produce high quality wine.
This attracted the attention of an American importer and enabled him to enter the US market at the end of the 1980s, commanding prices well above the average for the period.
At this stage, no more than 5,000 bottles were being made from his 7.5ha of vineyard – around 3,500 bottles of Valpolicella and 1,500 of Amarone.
These drastically reduced yields and hyper-selection became hallmarks of the estate, but Romano knew that castigating the vines in a vineyard which was not designed for low yields was a compromise.
Following visits to France to study high-density planting, Romano planted a vineyard with 11,000 vines/ha in 1996, and over the next 10 years, between new acquisitions and the replanting of existing plots, he converted the entire estate to hyper-density, resulting in revolutionary low yields unheard of in the Veneto at that time.
Rethinking the process
The vineyard is the starting place, but it does not stop there. Romano likes to cite the late Carlo Petrini’s dictum that, ‘From great grapes you can also make excellent vinegar’, and the refinement of the vinification processes has played a crucial role in the evolution of the winery.
The distinctive features of Dal Forno’s wines – the purity of fruit, the dry elegance, the finesse of the tannins, and the extreme technical precision – can all be traced to specific innovations in winemaking over the course of time.
The fruit quality comes from the rethinking of the grape drying (‘appassimento’) process.
Romano recounts that in the first years: ‘Clients used to come to visit… and I would proudly show them grapes still laid out to dry in April. When I think about it now, I think, how stupid I was’.
The concentration that comes with appassimento is indispensable to Amarone, but over-long drying compromises the purity of the fruit, introducing notes of advanced evolution.
‘Appassimento isn’t like sending a school kid to do cramming lessons to make up for what he didn’t learn at school’, Romano notes. ‘It’s that extra bit of study that helps him to excel’.
Reducing the length of appassimento meant going back to the vineyard and picking later to have levels of ripeness which offset a shorter period of grape drying.
Grapes for Amarone now dry for no more than 60 days, and since 2001 the fruit for Dal Forno’s Valpolicella is pressed after 30 days.
Since 2020, production has been managed by Romano’s son, Marco.
The second milestone in the forming of the house style was the development of a drier style of Amarone.
‘Amarone is an opulent wine; if it’s not opulent it’s not Amarone, but that opulence has to be supported by a freshness and sapidity that make it inviting to drink’.
Final tweaks
Obtaining the elegance of the style he was looking for meant reducing the residual sugar, but up until 1993, when he moved into new, purpose-built cellars, fermenting all the sugar out of musts with the massive concentration of partially dried grapes was problematic.
He says: ‘I remember that in the early years, not having the technology, nor the understanding of how to solve the issue, many vintages ended up with residual sugar. Perhaps some clients liked the old-fashioned style, but I didn’t.
‘Amarone should have three or four grams of residual sugar, maximum five, but sometimes it used to go up to eight, nine or even 10 grams. They might have drunk all right when they were young, but with age those wines became fat and sticky’.
The ability to control the temperatures in the final stage of fermentation through underfloor heating in the new cellars was the piece of the jigsaw that completed the picture.
From the first vinifications in cement vats in the old family cellar, in order to get the textures he was looking for, Romano has always experimented with crushing, fermenting and punching down together in the same vessels.
When he moved into the new cellars he started experimenting with vinification in barriques.
‘I found out later that in France, Château Le Pin was vinifying in the same way, but I didn’t know that when I started,’ he recalls.
Romano was not satisfied with the initial results, but he learned from the experience.
‘In 1995, I constructed the prototype of a vat that reproduces the vinification in barriques, and from then on, it was plain sailing.’
Defending identity
I put it to Romano that there is great stylistic diversity in the Amarones produced today, and I asked for his views on the direction it should take in the future – should it try to accommodate modern tastes, or remain faithful to its origins?
His reply left no doubt about his convictions: ‘There is a theory among some producers that Amarone should become a wine to drink throughout the meal… but it has no sense.
‘Amarone is not an everyday wine. We are talking about wines with 16-17 degrees of alcohol. I can’t imagine an Amarone with 14 degrees. To go under 16% you lose concentration, you lose substance… If we turn Amarone into a vinello (‘a little wine’) what have we achieved? We’ve lost that identity that has brought us to where we are today.
‘When we begin to put into question emblems, Amarone and Recioto… we are destroying our history’.
Dal Forno Amarone in some vintages, such as the great 2011, has touched 17% abv and perhaps even a half a point higher, but the wines have always maintained that characteristic. The current aim is to stabilise at 16%, but not to go under.
Romano believes that accommodating Amarone to perceived commercial demand for wines to drink throughout a meal is a betrayal of its true character.
‘Reducing the alcohol, you have to press earlier and then you lose concentration and substance’.
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