Winemaker Notes
#15 James Suckling Top 100 Wines of the World 2025
The bouquet is intense, complex, fruit-forward and spicy with hints or ripe red berry fruits enriched by various spicy notes. Warm, soft and harmonic on the palate. Great balance among pronounced tannins, acidity and savoriness. This elegant wine has great potential for further cellar aging.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Intense, vibrant aromas of strawberries and raspberries, together with cola and flowery notes. Milk and mint nuances, too. Shows a lot of licorice elegance and blood-orange freshness on both the nose and palate with firm, velvety tannins and well-packed, brilliant acidity and a polished finish. Good aftertaste and amazing potential. Very classic.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2020 Brunello Di Montalcino Pianrosso pours a medium red hue with orange-tinged edges and leans into a more vertical, tension-driven style. The nose reveals orange oils, dried cranberries, currants, raspberries, bright spice, and delicate smoke. Medium-bodied, it’s driven by vibrant acidity and well-defined tannins, with salty accents and a long finish that feels focused and energetic.
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Vinous
Freshly split pine, tobacco and stone dust gives way to dried strawberries and mint nuances as the 2020 Brunello di Montalcino Pianrosso slowly blossoms in the glass. Silken and serene, this excels through its acidity, cool-toned and fresh, enlivening the 2020s core of rich wild berry fruits. Hints of blood orange add further gravitas as it finishes with a surprisingly juicy character, leaving edgy tannins and a pleasantly bitter concentration. This wild child will require cellaring to come fully into focus, yet I'm incredibly excited to revisit it in another three to five years.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Ciacci Piccolomini d'Aragona 2020 Brunello di Montalcino Pianrosso (with 43,000 bottles made along with some larger formats) is a little overdone in my opinion in terms of ripeness and its powerful 15.5% alcoholic content. The bouquet reveals dark fruit aromas, cherry liqueur, brandied plum and sweet crème de cassis. This is a thickly grained Brunello with a soft, richly textured core. I recommend a medium-term drinking window, although that touch of tannic astringency might never fully integrate.
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Wine Spectator
A mix of fruity and savory elements, this red is supple and shows fine presence midpalate, evoking cherry, strawberry, tomato leaf and iron flavors. Ends with oak spice and earth accents. Best from 2027 through 2040.
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.