Winemaker Notes
#64 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2025
It has a wonderful, deep, ruby red colour, a wide aromatic range of scents in which delicious vanilla notes, small red fruit, layers of jam and sweet spices combine. The taste appears to have a full aristocratic roundness and softness, with quite elegant, agreeable and lingering flavors.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Showing dark color and inky concentration, the Famiglia Cotarella 2021 Montiano Cotarella is a super elegant and complex wine. Its creator, Riccardo Cotarella, says, "This is the Montiano of my dreams." The winemaking team worked carefully on destemming in order to keep berries intact going from the belt to steel fermenters without pumps. They do twice-daily punch-downs, allowing for a slow and easy fermentation. This wine shows a special silkiness with round cherry, blackberry and spice. It offers terrific balance.
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Vinous
The 2021 Montiano is intense from the first tilt of the glass. It bursts with a blend of cedar shavings, cloves and cocoa before giving way to dried blueberries and sage. This is pure elegance on the palate, velvety smooth yet lifted in feel with cool-toned acidity and a mix of red and black fruits that slowly saturate toward the close. The 2021 tapers off with outstanding length and concentration, leaving grippy tannins and a pleasant blackberry and dark chocolate tinge that puckers the cheeks. This is a beautifully refined Montiano that displays fine integration of oak.
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James Suckling
This is really intense, with pencil shavings, graphite, purple fruit and violets on the nose. Medium-bodied, refined and very polished, with mineral and basalt undertones. Just a hint of wood at the end. Very pretty now, but better in a year or two. Drink or hold.
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Wine Spectator
Fragrant and enticing, with warm spice and dried flower aromas accenting flavors of baked black cherry and cured tobacco, plus hints of dark chocolate and black licorice. This is suave and well-meshed, with a bit of a dark, brooding feel paired to fresh focus and length. Supple tannins emerge to firm the finish.
With generous fruit and supple tannins, Merlot is made in a range of styles from everyday-drinking to world-renowned and age-worthy. Merlot is the dominant variety in the wines from Bordeaux’s Right Bank regions of St. Emilion and Pomerol, where it is often blended with Cabernet Franc to spectacular result. Merlot also frequently shines on its own, particularly in California’s Napa Valley. Somm Secret—As much as Miles derided the variety in the 2004 film, Sideways, his prized 1961 Château Cheval Blanc is actually a blend of Merlot and Cabernet Franc.
Known as the ancient homeland of the Latins, today there is a vigorus wine industry beyond the city limits of modern, bustling Rome. The Cesanese grape, full of red berry, spice and rose, is responsible for Lazio’s only true local reds. Lazio’s most famous white wine, called Frascati, is based on the local Malvasia del Lazio and Trebbiano Toscana. A sweet version, called Cannellino di Frascati, is also made.