A day at Monte dei Ragni, in Valpolicella

It was the summer of 2025, on a trip through Italy. A few country roads above Fumane, in the heart of Valpolicella Classica, and a farm that looks like no wine estate you have seen. Tommaso and Leonardo, Zeno Zignoli's sons, welcomed us with a warmth one does not forget: the cellar, the vines, a long moment spent together talking about their work. You leave Monte dei Ragni with the feeling of having touched something rare.

A farm before it is an estate

This land has been farmed for five generations. The dry-stone terraces you still walk today were built by hand by those who came before, and Zeno Zignoli, who arrived in 1997, made the place what it is: a farm before it is an estate. The place is tiny: a handful of hectares in all, only two of them under vine, the rest given over to olive trees, cherry trees, fruit trees, cereals and a vegetable garden. Zeno, whom Wine Spectator once called "the poet of Valpolicella", works it with his sons, almost alone.

Everything by hand

Nothing here is handed over to chemistry. The vines are farmed biodynamically — uncertified, out of conviction rather than for a label — and homeopathy is even used in the vineyard. The soil is worked by horse. The grass is not mown but rolled flat, in July, after flowering, to protect the earth. Compost is made on the farm, by hand, from the life of the place, and goes back to the vines. Fruit trees are planted among the rows to give them shade; further along, Zeno is trialling "married vines", trained up maples and ash trees — one shelters the predator of the red spider mite, the other the nests of the blue tits that eat the insects. "You have to learn to paint with other colours," he says of monoculture. Everything here works as a system.

The wines

The estate essentially makes two wines: Amarone della Valpolicella Classico and Valpolicella Ripasso Classico Superiore. Alongside them, a rosé, the Ropié — Corvina and Molinara, as IGT Verona —, a white aged in amphora and, in some years, a little Recioto or a Valpolicella without ripasso. Total production never exceeds a few thousand bottles a year. In the cellar everything happens in wood and terracotta, without pumps: "wine is made with the nose and the hands, not with buttons," Zeno says. The Ripasso comes from Corvina, Rondinella and Molinara; part of the grapes are dried on the upper floor of the cellar before pressing, the wine ferments in tank, then "passes again" over the Amarone skins to finish its fermentation. It is then aged for around thirty months in large old casks.

We tasted the range at the estate, and I recently opened a bottle of the 2021 Ripasso. I know of no other wine from this appellation with that finesse, that purity, that elegance. An aromatic complexity I have tasted nowhere else, and the rare paradox of a wine at once light and very deep. It is, without hesitation, one of the finest bottles I have had the chance to open in recent years.

We have worked with Monte dei Ragni since 2025. It is a privilege, and a source of pride, to be able to distribute their wines.