Veneto Wine: History of Prosecco, Amarone & the Wines of Verona

Veneto wine is Italy at its most productive and its most global. This north-eastern region around Verona and Venice makes more wine than almost any other in Italy — and it produced the drink that conquered the twenty-first century: Prosecco. But there is far more here than bubbles. The Veneto is also home to Amarone, the extraordinary red pressed from dried grapes, and to a wine culture reaching back to the poets of ancient Rome. This is the full story of Veneto wine.

Italy’s wine powerhouse

If Tuscany is Italy’s most romantic wine region and Piedmont its most revered, the Veneto is its engine. Year after year it is among the largest producers of wine in the whole country, and its capital, Verona, hosts Vinitaly, the biggest wine trade fair on earth. This is a region built on range: it can make an ocean of cheerful, inexpensive fizz and, a few valleys away, one of Italy’s most concentrated and expensive reds — sometimes from villages within sight of each other.¹

Prosecco: the wine that ate the world

No wine rose faster than Prosecco. Made from the Glera grape and given its bubbles cheaply and quickly in pressurised steel tanks (the Charmat method, rather than Champagne’s slow bottle fermentation), it became the everyday sparkling wine of the world in barely two decades, overtaking Champagne in global bottles sold. But it has a serious heart. Its historic home is a range of impossibly steep, hand-worked hills between the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene — the source of Prosecco Superiore DOCG, and, at the very top, the tiny prized cru of Cartizze. In 2019 those hills were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a rare honour for a working vineyard landscape.²

In barely twenty years Prosecco went from a local Veneto fizz to the most-sold sparkling wine on the planet.

The grape that had to change its name

Prosecco’s very success created a problem. “Prosecco” was originally the name of the grape, which meant anyone, anywhere, could plant it and sell “Prosecco” — and as the boom took off, producers as far away as Australia began to do exactly that. So in 2009 Italy pulled off a clever legal manoeuvre: it officially renamed the grape Glera and turned “Prosecco” into a protected place, tied to a defined zone of north-east Italy. It is the same trick Champagne and Tokaj had used before — converting a word everyone could use into a name only one region could — and it locked one of the world’s most popular wines to the Veneto.³

Amarone: the wine of dried grapes

An hour west of the Prosecco hills lies the Veneto’s opposite masterpiece. In Valpolicella, growers make Amarone by an ancient technique called appassimento: the best bunches of Corvina and Rondinella are laid out on racks or mats and left to dry for months into winter, shrivelling to concentrated, raisiny sweetness before they are pressed. Fermented fully dry, they yield a huge, velvety red of 15% alcohol or more. Legend has it that Amarone was born by accident, when a cask of the region’s traditional sweet dried-grape wine, Recioto, was forgotten and fermented all the way out, turning bitter — amaro — hence “Amarone.” Historians think the truth is more deliberate than that, but the drying method itself is genuinely old, a direct survival of how the Romans made their finest wine.⁴

The same method gives the Veneto its clever everyday trick: ripasso, an ordinary Valpolicella re-fermented over the leftover Amarone skins to borrow some of that richness — a “baby Amarone” that made the region’s fortune.⁴

Soave, Valpolicella, and the Veronese classics

Around Verona sit the region’s workhorse classics. Soave, made from the Garganega grape, was for decades one of the most famous Italian white names in the world — then nearly destroyed its own reputation through mass overproduction, before a new generation of growers rediscovered the volcanic hills of the Classico heartland and restored it to seriousness. Its red cousins, everyday Valpolicella and light, chillable Bardolino from the shores of Lake Garda, complete a quartet — Soave, Valpolicella, Bardolino, Amarone — that together define the wine of Verona.⁵

The wine Virgil praised

The Veneto’s wine story did not begin with Prosecco — it is thousands of years old. The wine of these foothills, known to the Romans as Raeticum, was celebrated in antiquity: the poet Virgil, born just to the west near Mantua, praised it, and the emperor Augustus was said to prize it above all others. Long before Venice became a trading empire floating wine across the Mediterranean, the hills behind it were already supplying the tables of Rome. Few wine regions can trace so unbroken a line from the Roman Empire to the modern supermarket shelf.⁶

The Pinot Grigio flood

There is one more Veneto wine the world drinks without always knowing where it comes from. The flat lands of the north-east are the engine of Italian Pinot Grigio, much of it bottled under the vast “delle Venezie” denomination created in 2017 to bring order to the category. Crisp, inexpensive and reliable, it is — alongside Prosecco — how the Veneto quietly became the source of two of the best-selling Italian wines on earth.⁵

Venice, and the wine of merchants

The Veneto’s other great contribution to wine was not a grape but a trade. For centuries the Republic of Venice was the wine-broker of Europe, its galleys carrying sweet, strong wines from its colonies in Greece and Crete to the courts of the north. The most prized was Malvasia — “Malmsey” to the English — and Venice so dominated its commerce that the city’s wine bars are still called malvasie today. That trade even left a mark on English history: according to legend, in 1478 George, Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward IV, chose to be executed by being drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine — the Venetian import having become the ultimate symbol of luxury.⁸

Every Veneto wine story on This Day in Wine History

Go deeper on the region’s wines and the people who shaped them:

• The history of Prosecco: how Italy’s sparkling wine conquered the world
• Luigi Veronelli: the writer who championed Italian terroir

See all Veneto articles →

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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Native Wine Grapes of Italy

Ian D’Agata

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Sources & further reading

1. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding, eds., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Veneto”; and Nicolas Belfrage MW, Barolo to Valpolicella: The Wines of Northern Italy (London: Faber & Faber, 2003). Oxford Reference. ↩
2. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Prosecco”; and UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Le Colline del Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene” (inscribed 2019) (primary source). whc.unesco.org. ↩
3. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Prosecco” and “Glera” — on the 2009 renaming of the grape. ↩
4. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Amarone della Valpolicella,” “recioto” and “appassimento”; and “Amarone della Valpolicella: not from a ‘lucky’ mistake,” WineNews. winenews.it. ↩
5. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Soave,” “Valpolicella,” “Garganega” and “Pinot Grigio.” ↩
6. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Ancient Rome” and “Rhaetic” — on the wine praised by Virgil and Augustus. ↩
7. Ian D’Agata, Native Wine Grapes of Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) — on Glera, Corvina and Garganega. University of California Press. ↩
8. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Venice,” “Malvasia” and “Malmsey” — on the Venetian wine trade and the drowning of the Duke of Clarence. ↩