Winemaker Notes
Ideal with red meat, savory game, and aged cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Plenty of plums and cracked sea salt on the nose. Medium body, chewy tannins and a layered, fruity finish. Balanced and showing depth.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Castello Banfi's 2014 Brunello di Montalcino Poggio alle Mura clocks in at a higher intensity and textural threshold compared to the annata Brunello released in this same vintage. This single-vineyard expression sees more concentration and power, and you notice it more in a vintage like 2014 that delivers so many undertone wines. This wine has evidently been engineered (thanks to fruit selection, slightly longer maceration times and a greater use of barrique as opposed to botte) to produce this very noticeable step up in power. The 2014 vintage calls for this approach.
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Wine Enthusiast
Black-skinned fruit, fragrant purple-flower and baking-spice aromas mingle with a whiff of tilled soil. It's elegantly structured with youthful tension, delivering juicy Morello cherry, spiced plum, star anise and tobacco alongside fine-grained tannins and bright acidity. Drink 2021–2029.
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Wine Spectator
This is rich, maintaining a sense of elegance and vibrancy. Cherry, plum, leather, tobacco, iron and earth flavors mingle, backed by a solid structure. Finishes long and satisfying. Best from 2021 through 2035.
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.