A landowning family, a cellar and a nickname.

Allegrini is a wine house in Fumane, in the Valpolicella Classica zone in the hills north-west of Verona, best known for Amarone della Valpolicella and for single-vineyard reds from the native Corvina grape. The company says the Allegrini family has played a leading role in the history of Fumane and Valpolicella Classica since the 16th century, and that it is among the area’s important landowning families. The modern business, the company says, took shape from the 1960s under Giovanni Allegrini, whom it describes as one of the architects of the rebirth of Valpolicella. It remembers him by a nickname, “the barrel spider,” for the way he would spring from one barrel to the next as visitors tasted his wines in the cellar.

Giovanni Allegrini died in 1983, Wine Spectator reported in December 2023, and his three children took over: Franco, who ran the cellar; Walter, who looked after the vineyards; and Marilisa, who became chief executive and the public face of the company, according to the magazine. The company’s own history gives the same division of roles, saying Franco took charge of winemaking from 1983 and Walter personally led the viticulture. Walter Allegrini died suddenly in the summer of 2003, the company and Wine Spectator both say, and Franco Allegrini died in 2022, Wine Spectator reported; the company says that since 2022 his legacy has been carried on by his sons.

Valpolicella Classica, the company explains, is made up of five municipalities — Sant’Ambrogio, San Pietro in Cariano, Fumane, Marano and Negrar — lying between Verona and Lake Garda, below the Lessini Mountains. The Allegrini reds are made from grapes grown there, chiefly Corvina, Corvinone and Rondinella, with Oseleta also planted on the company’s La Grola hill. Beyond Valpolicella the company also lists a Soave, and a Lugana from its Oasi Mantellina vineyard at Pozzolengo, in the province of Brescia, planted in 2017.

La Grola, La Poja and the drying loft.

The turning point in the company’s story, as it tells it, came in 1979, when Giovanni Allegrini bought the hill of La Grola in Sant’Ambrogio di Valpolicella after years of neglect. The company says he was the first in Valpolicella to introduce Guyot training, replacing the traditional pergola with rows that allowed much denser planting. On the flat, chalky plateau at the top of the hill he planted La Poja, also in 1979, as a vineyard of Corvina alone. The wine of the same name is labelled Corvina Veronese IGT rather than Valpolicella, and the company calls it its most exclusive wine; it also says La Poja is one of the few Italian wines offered through the Place de Bordeaux, the merchant system through which many of Bordeaux’s best-known estates sell their wines.

The other wine the company names as a signature is Palazzo della Torre, named after the vineyard around Villa Della Torre in Fumane. The company describes a two-stage method: about seventy per cent of the grapes are fermented at harvest, while the rest are dried and vinified in December, and the two wines are blended before at least fifteen months in barriques. The company credits the approach to Franco Allegrini and calls the wine a precursor of the double-fermentation method.

Drying grapes — appassimento — is the heart of Amarone, and here too the company credits Franco. It says he introduced barriques alongside the traditional large Slavonian oak barrels, and that he was the mastermind of Terre di Fumane, a dedicated drying facility where large fans keep the air moving over the grapes through autumn and winter. During those months, the company says, the grapes lose between 40 and 50 per cent of their weight. Wine Spectator wrote in 2023 that Franco led the construction of the facility to control humidity, temperature and airflow. The range today, as listed on the company’s site, runs from Valpolicella Classico through La Grola, a Valpolicella Superiore made without dried grapes, to the Amarone Classico, the hillside Fieramonte Amarone and a Recioto named after Giovanni Allegrini.

The company also reports a series of sustainability certifications: Biodiversity Friend since 2017, the Equalitas sustainability standard in 2019, and a Biodiversity Friend beekeeping certification in 2023.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Italian wine houses and labels: Gaja, Sassicaia, Ornellaia, Tignanello, Allegrini, Zenato and Pio Cesare. Wine houses and labels in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that belong to a larger wine group or estate, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a wine shop to a restaurant list.

A wine brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, bought new vineyards or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One family name, two companies.

The biggest recent change at Allegrini concerns ownership. On 14 December 2023 the company announced, in a release dated Fumane, that the family had signed an initial agreement to divide its key assets. Under it, Franco’s sons Francesco, Giovanni and Matteo Allegrini would acquire the majority of the Allegrini company and of Corte Giara, the family’s second Valpolicella label, which Wine Spectator describes as a négociant brand, and would run both together with their cousin Silvia Allegrini, Walter’s daughter. Harper’s noted at the time that the agreement was at an early stage. The company’s site now names Francesco, Giovanni, Matteo and Silvia as the generation at its helm.

Marilisa Allegrini and her daughters Carlotta and Caterina kept the other properties: Poggio al Tesoro in Bolgheri, San Polo in Montalcino and Villa Della Torre in Fumane. Poggio al Tesoro says on its own site that Marilisa and Walter founded it in Bolgheri in 2001. Villa Della Torre, a Renaissance villa its owners attribute to Giulio Romano and Michele Sanmicheli, says it has been owned by the Mastella Allegrini family since 2008, houses a ten-room wine and art relais, and has been a winery in its own right since 2019. Wine Spectator also credited Marilisa with helping to establish Famiglie Storiche, a group of historic Amarone families, in 2009.

That division matters for anyone looking up the brand. Allegrini, with its wines from Fumane and Sant’Ambrogio, has its site at allegrini.it; Villa Della Torre, Poggio al Tesoro and San Polo now sit with Marilisa Allegrini’s side of the family, each with its own site, even though the villa’s vineyard still gives its name to the Allegrini wine Palazzo della Torre.

For a design guide, Allegrini shows how a Valpolicella family house can build its identity on named places — a hill, a plateau, a villa — and on the slow craft of drying grapes. Compare Masi, the Boscaini family’s Amarone house in Valpolicella, and Zenato, the family winery that grew from Lugana into Valpolicella. For this guide we use Amarone garnet, limestone white and pergola green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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