A. In the last few years wine drinkers got used to read on wine labels, mainly Italian, the word “appassimento”, but what is appassimento?
Appassimento is nothing new,
Amarone della Valpolicella and
Sforzato della Valtellina are two Italian appellations that dry (appassire, hence appassimento) the grapes before fermenting them to concentrate the sugar by letting the water evaporate to produce fruiter, bolder wines. The same process is also used for sweet wines (passiti) where the fermentation is stopped to have higher residual sugar.
There are different techniques to dry the grapes, the main ones are:
On the vine, harvesting the grapes later
Natural, after the harvesting, putting the grapes to dry naturally