The hills north and west of Verona are not dramatic in the way of the Cinque Terre cliffs or the Amalfi limestone. The slopes here are gentler — gradients of 20 to 35 degrees rather than 60 — and the rock is predominantly basalt and limestone overlaid with glacial moraines. But the area contains one of the highest concentrations of terraced vineyard land in Italy, and the agricultural decisions made across this landscape over the past eight centuries have shaped the wines that carry its name.
The Valpolicella Classic zone
The Valpolicella Classico zone — the original production area before the DOC boundaries were expanded — covers approximately 8,000 hectares in the valleys of Negrar, Marano, Fumane, Sant'Ambrogio, and San Pietro in Cariano, northwest of Verona. Within this area, the hillside vineyards are predominantly terraced, while the valley floors carry flat-trained vines on alluvial soils. The two zones produce measurably different fruit from the same Corvina, Rondinella, and Molinara varieties, and winemakers consistently report that the terraced hillside plots produce more concentrated and longer-lived wines.
This is not surprising given what the terrace does to the growing environment. Hillside vines are exposed to more hours of direct sunlight per day than valley vines, particularly in the morning and afternoon when the angle of the slope faces the sun. The shallow, stony soils drain rapidly, reducing vine vigour and forcing root development deeper into the subsoil. The resulting grapes are smaller-berried, with higher skin-to-pulp ratios — the physical basis for the colour, tannin, and extract that Amarone depends on.
Stone construction in the basalt zone
The terrace walls of the Valpolicella Classico zone are built primarily from basalt, a dark volcanic stone quarried from outcrops throughout the hills. Basalt splits into irregular but relatively flat slabs that are well-suited to dry-stone construction. The walls here tend to be lower than those of the Cinque Terre — rarely exceeding 1.5 metres in height — because the slope angles are less severe and the individual terrace benches are correspondingly wider.
The construction logic is the same: battered face, through-stones at intervals, fill stone behind the face. But the wider terraces mean the fill volume is proportionally greater, and the drainage management more complex. Some older walls in the Fumane valley incorporate small clay drainage pipes in the fill layer — a refinement not commonly seen in the Ligurian or Campanian terrace systems, where the wall face itself provides sufficient drainage.
The appassimento connection
The Valpolicella area's most distinctive wine — Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG — is made by a process called appassimento: the harvested grapes are dried on wooden racks for three to four months before pressing. The drying concentrates sugars, acids, and all phenolic compounds. The result is a wine of unusual density.
This process places specific demands on the grape. Fruit harvested from high-yielding flat vineyards tends to carry too much water content for effective drying — it rots rather than desiccates. The smaller, drier berries from hillside terraced plots are better suited. This is why the top Amarone producers continue to source preferentially from terraced Classico hillsides even when flat-land grapes from the expanded DOC zone are available at lower cost.
The Soave hills and garganega on tufa
East of Verona, the Soave Classico zone presents a different geological scenario. Here the dominant stone is tufa — a porous volcanic rock that holds water differently from the basalt of Valpolicella. Tufa terrace walls are structurally weaker than basalt walls and require more frequent maintenance; the stone erodes at the face more rapidly when exposed to repeated freeze-thaw cycles in winter.
The garganega vine planted on these tufa terraces produces the white Soave that carries the Classico designation. As with Valpolicella, the hillside terraced plots are considered qualitatively distinct from the flat extended zone. The Soave Classico DOCG label is restricted to the original hill zone — roughly 2,600 hectares — and commands meaningfully higher prices in trade than non-Classico Soave.
Mechanisation and its limits on terraced land
One of the defining challenges of terraced viticulture is the near-total exclusion of mechanical harvesting. Grape-harvesting machines require flat ground or gradients below 10 to 12 degrees to operate. Terraced plots in Valpolicella and Soave are handpicked, which adds approximately 40 to 60 euros per 100 kilograms of harvested fruit compared to mechanised operations in the plain below. This cost differential is the single largest factor driving the financial pressure on small hillside producers.
Small tracked vehicles — called monorotaie or monorail carriers in some areas — can transport harvested grapes down the terraces, reducing the physical labour of carrying full crates. The Valpolicella hills have seen increased adoption of these systems since the early 2000s. They do not replace the picking labour but they reduce the injury risk from carrying heavy loads on steep terrain.
The Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene comparison
The Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG hills, northeast of Treviso, were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019. The terrace systems there are characterised by the ciglioni — low grass-covered earth banks rather than stone walls — which reflects the different geology and rainfall patterns of the Pre-Alps east of Vicenza. This distinction is worth noting for anyone comparing the stone-walled terrace systems of Valpolicella and Soave with the earth-banked terraces of Prosecco country: they represent different adaptive responses to different physical conditions, though the agricultural challenge — maintaining cultivation on a slope — is the same.
Abandonment patterns in the Veneto hills
The rate of terrace abandonment in the Valpolicella and Soave hills is lower than in the Cinque Terre or the upper Amalfi slopes, for a straightforward reason: the commercial value of the DOC and DOCG appellations provides an economic incentive that small producers in Liguria and Campania cannot match. An hectare of Amarone-producing hillside in Valpolicella Classico is worth substantially more than an hectare of sciacchetrà or sfusato lemon terrace. This is not a cultural observation but a commercial one: land value correlates directly with maintenance investment.
Nevertheless, the smaller and less accessible terraces in the upper valley sections — particularly in Fumane and Marano — have been progressively abandoned since the 1980s as producers consolidated holdings on the more accessible mid-slope. The abandoned sections have typically reverted to woodland over twenty to thirty years, with only the stone wall faces remaining visible.
External references: UNESCO Prosecco Hills inscription · Consorzio Valpolicella · Consorzio Tutela Vino Soave
