2022 L'Arco Rosso del Veronese 750 ml

It's a good thing for the wine world that the teenage Luca Fedrigo liked fast motorcycles and chasing girls.

At seventeen, Luca was racing Ducatis and trying to date a young woman who happened to be Bepi Quintarelli's granddaughter. When she asked if he'd mind doing some work in her grandfather's garden, Luca agreed—never imagining where it would lead. Those initial hours pulling weeds quickly evolved into something far more significant: an education in winemaking under one of Italy's most legendary producers.

As young Luca spent more time around the property, a bond formed between the master and the teenager. Quintarelli had been searching for someone to carry forward his approach to wine—someone unformed enough to truly absorb his methods. In this motorcycle-obsessed kid, he found exactly that. 

For over ten years, mentor and apprentice labored together among the vines and in the cellar. Quintarelli shared his techniques, stressed the value of regional heritage, and cultivated a deep reverence for the terroir in his protégé. As Vinous noted: “To this day, Luca Fedrigo's respect for his mentor and the winemaking style he learned first-hand from him remains completely intact.”

When Luca launched L'Arco using his father's vineyards, which had been established near Negrar during the 1960s, Bepi Quintarelli helped him finance the project. Luca built out his cellar beneath the family's old house, and everything at L'Arco is handled by Fedrigo alone. He prunes, harvests, crushes, and barrels every drop himself. Following his mentor's example, he matures his wines in large Slavonian oak casks over extended periods. In 2004, he added a small Sangiovese planting as a tribute to a friend from Tuscany.

The Rosso del Veronese brings together half-century-old Corvina, Corvinone, Rondinella, and Molinara from the stony clay terrain of the Classico zone, lifted by that 15% Sangiovese grown on alluvial ground closer to the Adige River. Following meticulous sorting by hand, the grapes are removed from their stems and fermented using only the wild yeasts present in the vineyard. It’s brilliant, and reminds us of the first time we tried Quintarelli’s Valpolicella.