1997 Allegrini Palazzo della Torre Veronese IGT, $18

I picked this bottle up three or four years ago during a round of visits to local wine shops in search of the last of the 1997 Italian vintage, which was a winner in Tuscany. Mostly I ended up with Reserve Chiantis, which Nancy and I are now enjoying periodically after a short bit of cellaring.

I snagged the Palazzo della Torre in the process, even though it hails from Lombardy, a couple climate zones to the north. My first “serious” Valpolicellas came from Allegrini a few years back, and the label looked familiar, so I was expecting more of the same. Turns out that starting in 1997, the single-vineyard Palazzo della Torre went through a vinous makeover—which led to a memorable tasting moment when I finally opened it up.

Traditional Valpolicella is a great example of the type of lovely, graceful, medium-bodied reds that Old Europe does so well and that California has yet to master. Like Chianti and Beaujolais, Valpolicella delights at mealtime because it makes you want another bite of food, not because it makes your jaw drop in awe. If you need a blockbuster, the folks in Lombardy can arrange an upgrade to an Amarone—same indigenous grape varieties, but made vastly richer (and higher in alcohol) by a second round of fermentation fueled by the addition of dried, raisined grapes.

On a Thursday night at home, to wash down a mushroom risotto Nancy had made, I raised my glass—and did a sensory double-take. I was primed for light and lively; I was confronted with deep, dark and dense. Cherries after transubstantiation. I knew it wasn’t Allegrini’s Amarone, which has a very different bottle and label package; but reading the fine print, it wasn’t a Valpolicella, either. It was a Veronese IGT—short for Indicazione Geografica Tipica, the Italian catch-all for “wines that don’t exactly follow the rules.”

A little bit of web research—the next day, after the bottle was history—informed me that starting in 1997, Allegrini began using a small amount of Sangiovese to supplement the native Corvina and Rondinella. More important, the wine was pumped up the December after harvest with a 30% dose of dried grapes. And I also quickly learned that ever since, vintage after vintage, the Palazzo has made its way onto the annual Top 100 lists of various wine magazines and collected buckets of points from the pointy-heads.

And it’s still selling for twenty bucks. The 2001 should still be out on the shelves—unless I get there first.