1990 was an excellent year for Amarone. This is darker in colour than its predecessors, with delicate herbal aromatics leading towards black fruit and vanilla. Flavours of cherry, plum, hedgerow fruits, violet, chocolate and sweet spices lend this still-youthful wine great complexity, while the long finish reveals a defined, three-dimensional profile with integrated tannins, vibrant acidity and beautiful baked strawberry fragrance. A benchmark wine, which will provide tons of enjoyment now yet has plenty of time left. (Drink between 2018-2035)

When Robert M. Parker Jr. first reviewed this wine back in 1997, he wrote: "Full-bodied, powerful and rich, with no hard edges, this is a heady, sensationally endowed wine that should drink well for 15 years. Wow! An amazing wine." Today, I am tasting this wine more than 20 years after those words were published, and the 1990 Amarone della Valpolicella Vigneto di Monte Lodoletta is still holding on, albeit tenuously. In Mr. Parker's original review, he described the wine as "massively proportioned," and perhaps that is the key point of his review that no longer applies. This wine has thinned out and become more subdued over these three decades since the harvest, bringing delicate aromas of smoke, tar, dried tobacco leaves, graphite and crushed stone to the forefront of the bouquet. The mouthfeel is more streamlined, and we noticed that it took our bottle quite a while before those aromas started to reveal themselves. Our sample started closed, but it did open shyly with time. We considered opening a second bottle to confirm our impressions, but alas, none are left at the winery. My conclusion is that the wine is thinning out, and although our bottle may not have been perfect, there is enough energy here to reasonably extend its drinking window just a little longer. - Monica Larner