Winemaker Notes
To fully appreciate its qualities, decant the wine at least one hour before serving.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
An unforgiving, powerfully structured wine with fabulous grilled-meat, granite, dried-berry and flower-petal character. Full-bodied, chewy and intense. Great structure. Extremely long and intense. Sexy austerity. Gets the juices going. Best ever from here. Reminds me of the great Argianos of the 1970s.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Aged for 24 months in oak, the gorgeous 2010 Brunello di Montalcino is a brooding, dark wine with great aromatic purity. The fruit tones are rich and penetrating, spanning from plum, prune and cassis to spice cake, tar and black licorice. The wine's concentration is luscious and opulent. The oak element imparts lasting aromas of spice, toast and caramel but the wine already shows a good degree of integration that should help it continue its bottle evolution. Hold this wine until 2017.
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Wine Spectator
Dense and beefy, with a core of cherry augmented by tobacco, spice and earth flavors. Feels like it’s closing down, yet all the components are there and the finish is long. Best from 2019 through 2032.
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Wine & Spirits
Smoked almond and roasted coffee notes weave through dense blackberry and plum flavors, giving this a dark and dusky character that’s enlivened by vanilla, clove, anise and sage. The flavors take a savory turn on the finish, with a plum tomato tang—a good match for Bolognese sauce.
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.