The popularity of Amarone has been widely documented. At Italian seafood temples like Marea in Midtown Manhattan, you can see diners relishing this heavy red wine with ethereal raw-fish dishes. To each their own, I suppose.

The powerful wake of Amarone has given rise to a new style of Valpolicella, known as Ripasso. Valpolicella itself tends to be light- to medium-bodied wine, fragrant but not opulent. The popularity of Amarone led to efforts to add muscle to Valpolicella, by employing Amarone-like techniques to its production.

In order to make Ripasso, grape skins left over from Amarone production or dried grapes are added to Valpolicella. The resulting maceration adds body, tannins, alcohol and intensity to the wine.

With the natural inclination to assume that more is better, it is tempting to think that Valpolicella Ripasso, with more flavor, intensity and body, is better than ordinary Valpolicella. Many people feel that way, and Ripassos can be fine wines. But I have always preferred the freshness and easy drinkability of plain old Valpolicella, which, like Beaujolais, has historically been a wine you could knock back without fear of heaviness, headache or hangover.

Nonetheless, the popularity of Ripasso has made itself felt. In the last 10 years, production of ordinary Valpolicella has declined to 18 million bottles a year, from 41 million, according to the Consorzio Tutela Vini Valpolicella, a trade association.

“Nowadays, the trend is to use most of the vintage Valpolicella to produce Ripasso,” Olga Bussinello, director of the consortium, wrote in an email.

Keeping all this in mind, the wine panel recently tasted 20 bottles of Valpolicella from recent vintages. Our tasting coordinator, Bernard Kirsch, did his best to select only ordinary Valpolicellas for the tasting, but it’s not always easy to differentiate Valpolicella from Valpolicella Ripasso. The wine now has its own official designation, Ripasso della Valpolicella, but it is not always used.