Winemaker Notes
Brunello Riserva offers a solid, full body and excellent aging potential. Its ample and complex bouquet is reminiscent of violets, wild berries, cedar, leather, tobacco and spices. On the palate, it is austere and seductive with a perfect blend of fruit, acidity and mouth coating tannins. This is the perfect bottle for Brunello lovers.
Pair with Steak au poivre, rack of lamb or beef carpaccio.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Altesino 2016 Brunello di Montalcino Riserva holds tight to its unique character and power. The classic 2016 vintage produced generous wines that are layered and rich but also coiled tightly at their core. This wine exemplifies this point, adding lots of tart Sangiovese fruit and freshness along the way. It also shows an impressive richness of flavors with dried cherry, licorice, pressed violets, balsam herb and dusty limestone. The caveat with this wine, should you decide to drink it early, is that it needs extra time to open (and a double decanting would also help). This 10,000-bottle production opens beautifully in time.
Rating: 96+
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James Suckling
There’s beautiful purity in this Brunello with cherry and floral aromas, as well as hints of lavender and rosemary flowers. It’s full-bodied with linear tannins that provide form and focus. It’s extremely long and beautiful, yet needs three to four years to show all the goodness it has.
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Wine Enthusiast
This polished red opens with inviting aromas of ripe woodland berries, violet, new leather and camphor. Full-bodied and elegant, the smooth palate features fleshy black cherry, raspberry jam, licorice and tobacco alongside velvety, fine-grained tannins. Best after 2024.
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Wine Spectator
A beautifully integrated and solidly built Brunello, this is hallmarked by textbook aromas and flavors of cherry, strawberry, iron, sanguine and tobacco. Delivers accents of herbs, earth and almond that emerge as it plays out on the long, detailed finish.
Among Italy's elite red grape varieties, Sangiovese has the perfect intersection of bright red fruit and savory earthiness and is responsible for the best red wines of Tuscany. While it is best known as the chief component of Chianti, it is also the main grape in Vino Nobile di Montepulciano and reaches the height of its power and intensity in the complex, long-lived Brunello di Montalcino. Somm Secret—Sangiovese doubles under the alias, Nielluccio, on the French island of Corsica where it produces distinctly floral and refreshing reds and rosés.
Famous for its bold, layered and long-lived red, Brunello di Montalcino, the town of Montalcino is about 70 miles south of Florence, and has a warmer and drier climate than that of its neighbor, Chianti. The Sangiovese grape is king here, as it is in Chianti, but Montalcino has its own clone called Brunello.
The Brunello vineyards of Montalcino blanket the rolling hills surrounding the village and fan out at various elevations, creating the potential for Brunello wines expressing different styles. From the valleys, where deeper deposits of clay are found, come wines typically bolder, more concentrated and rich in opulent black fruit. The hillside vineyards produce wines more concentrated in red fruits and floral aromas; these sites reach up to over 1,600 feet and have shallow soils of rocks and shale.
Brunello di Montalcino by law must be aged a minimum of four years, including two years in barrel before realease and once released, typically needs more time in bottle for its drinking potential to be fully reached. The good news is that Montalcino makes a “baby brother” version. The wines called Rosso di Montalcino are often made from younger vines, aged for about a year before release, offer extraordinary values and are ready to drink young.