Giuseppe Quintarelli was an iconic figure for Italian wine; he died at the age of 84 in 2012; the business remains in the hands of the family and is run continuously by the grandchildren Francesco and Lorenzo. That of Giuseppe Quintarelli is a legendary winery, one of the most famous in Valpolicella founded in the early 1900s, appreciated for the rigorous and traditional style of long-aged red wines.
Giuseppe Quintarelli has been appointed "il maestro" (the teacher), as he has taught many other producers of Valpolicella, helping to raise the quality of the wines of the area and their reputation. His teachings included using only grapes from hilly vineyards, harvesting perfectly ripe grapes and practising long wine-ageing in large barrels. For Quintarelli, Amarone della Valpolicella must be a perfect wine and therefore it is not produced every year, but only in the best vintages. In the other cases the wine is bottled as IGT.
Quintarelli's Amarone are highly sought-after products and snatch exorbitant prices from wine lovers and collectors. They have a style that is different from any other Amarone, based on freshness and elegance. Traditionalist but not fundamentalist, Giuseppe Quintarelli welcomed the introduction of international varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Almost all of his reds are produced with drying of the grapes and with dried grapes of Cabernet and Merlot he produced an original passito wine, which has become a cult wine, called Alzero. Giuseppe Quintarelli above all was obsessed with quality: for him only high-quality wines had to be produced and marketed, otherwise it wasn't worth the effort. This tenacity of him has undoubtedly contributed to raising the reputation and the prices of the wines of the whole Valpolicella.
The winery is located in the municipality of Negrar as well as the 12 hectares of vineyards. Annual production is around 60,000 bottles.