Winemaker Notes
100% Sangiovese. Deep garnet color with orange hues, the bouquet shows red fruit and spice, confirmed on the palate. Soft tannins, firm structure and silky texture.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
The grapes for this Brunello come from Fuligni's oldest vines which typically go into the Riserva. In 2014, harvest was pushed back until mid-October in order to achieve full ripeness. The wine spent the first four to five months in small 5hl barrels to stabilise the colour, with the remaining time spent in traditional large botti. It opens with iron and savoury spice before revealing leather and tobacco leaf notes. There's definitely some flesh to pad out the structure in this well-balanced example, with smoky incense notes on the finish.
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James Suckling
Some smoky notes with savory and sanguine aromas, as well as deeply spicy red cherries. The palate delivers an impressively concentrated core of red-cherry and red-plum flavor. The tannins are succulent and the depth is good for this vintage. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Fuligni 2014 Brunello di Montalcino is a beautiful wine. To my mind, it represents one of the best interpretations you will find from this difficult vintage that caused so much unease. The Fuligni family shows a deft hand, resulting in a wine that offers more balance, intensity and depth than a good majority of its peers. It opens to a compact and streamlined style, but it follows through with an articulate set of aromas including cassis, red rose, camphor ash and aniseed. The mouthfeel is thin in texture but lengthy in flavor and freshness. This is a very traditional expression of Sangiovese in heart and soul.
Rating: 92+ -
Wine & Spirits
A poised, medium-bodied wine from the difficult 2014 vintage, this offers red berry flavors laced with notes of thyme and damp leaves, with smooth tannins that make it immediately appealing. Best Buy
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Wine Enthusiast
Alluring aromas of strawberry, violet, tilled earth and cake spice shape the refined nose. Taut and youthfully austere, the linear, rather light-bodied palate evokes crunchy cherry, powdered sage, orange zest and star anise alongside firm acidity and polished tannins.
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.