There are thousands of them.
Thousands of bottles of wine from vintages as far back as 1939 — including an astounding 43 vintages of their Amarone della Valpolicella — are tucked away inside black iron-clad alcoves carved into the foundation of Bertani’s historic Grezzana estate.
Accessible by descending a dimly lit staircase, hewn from locally mined red marble, The Library is chilly and still. Humidity levels are constantly monitored and the air is regularly purified and conditioned with infrared light and ozone. Every cork is original and none of the wines are ever opened with the intent to recondition. To Bertani, that would be tantamount to a violation of their history. Instead, they are left undisturbed as silent, but still very much alive, witnesses to the past.
Blindfolded, even the uninitiated visitor would be able to sense they are standing in rarefied air.
The Library’s breadth is, by almost all accounts, truly unique in the wine world — the result of a forward-thinking ethos that has been part of the Bertani DNA since the beginning. But its starting point is, interestingly, a bit of a meandering path with no one “Moment in Time” when the collection officially began. Rather, it was a series of circumstances, not all of them easy, that yielded such a vast collection.
When the longevity and age-worthiness of their Valpolicella wines became apparent to the Bertani family, they started tucking away barrels and bottles to age for great lengths of time, ever eager to push boundaries. The lovingly curated stockpiles slowly grew. During World Wars I and II, when cellars across Europe were plundered by invading forces, the Bertani family did an exceptional job of hiding their treasured legacy — some of it still in large barrels — behind false walls. According to Bertani legend, not a drop of wine was lost to looting.
Then in the 1950s, after the purchase of the Tenuta Novare estate in Valpolicella’s Negrar Valley, Bertani set out to make the most intense, ageworthy expression of Valpolicella wine possible — what they wound up creating was one of the very first dry appassimento wines, then called “Recioto della Valpolicella Amarone.” They still have bottles of the 1958, their very first vintage.
Today, in vintage years, Bertani intentionally reserves 10-15% of their production for The Library. Bottles are laid to rest in the cellar, unadorned by labels, slowly gathering dust until they are carefully extracted by a cellar worker who then cleans the bottles and labels each bottle (by hand) only at the time of shipment to a lucky buyer. To the winery, this kid glove care is the ultimate symbol of their artistry and craftsmanship.
