Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
This is a late-release wine with a garnet color and a red center. Aromas of red cherry, cedar, orange peel, earth and iron. Medium-bodied with a creamy texture and a tangy finish. Typical sour cherry and sliced orange flavors at the end. From biodynamically grown grapes.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The queen of the ball is the 2014 Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. This wine shows grace and elegance, and it pulls itself together with a profound sense of firmness and textural compactness. The quality of fruit is sweet and accessible, but the wine also reveals ethereal tones of grilled herb and blue flower that add to its good complexity. Avignonesi shows great results in a difficult vintage.
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Wine Spectator
A light, elegant style, delivering cherry, iron, leather and earth flavors in a balanced profile. Clean and lively, with a lingering aftertaste of leather, earth and almond. Drink now through 2023.
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.
This significant Tuscan village—not to be confused with the red grape of the same name widely grown in Abruzzo and the Marche regions—was home to one of the first four Italian DOCGs granted in 1980.
Based on the Sangiovese grape (here called Prugnolo Gentile), the village’s prized wine called Vino Nobile di Montepulciano ranks stylistically in between Chianti Classico, for its finesse, and Brunello di Montalcino for its power. With a deep ruby color, heavy concentration and a firm structure given by the village's heavy, cool clay soils, most Vino Nobile di Montepulciano will demand some bottle age.