Stay a Little Longer

Amarone della Valpolicella is made from partially dried grapes — a process called appassimento that concentrates the fruit over three to four months, producing a wine of extraordinary richness and depth. The grapes are harvested in autumn and laid on bamboo racks in airy lofts above the Valpolicella valleys, slowly losing water until in January they are pressed into a wine that can reach 17% alcohol naturally, with flavours of dried cherry, chocolate, leather and warm spice. Great Amarone rewards patience: it needs years, often a decade or more, before it reveals its true complexity. The Icon format — 120 × 160 cm — honours its scale. Stay a Little Longer was named for precisely this quality: she has no interest in hurrying.

Every WiWwaW portrait begins not with a canvas or a lens but with a moodboard — a private, intuitive assembly of words, colours, textures and images that together form the wine's character translated into a woman. The moodboard for Stay a Little Longer travels with the finished work to its collector: a window into the creative process, a second layer of the work itself.