Winemaker Notes
#50 Wine Enthusiast Top 100 Wines of 2019
Ruby red in color with light granite hues. The nose is clean, elegant, and prevalent of fruity notes such as ripe plum and wild cherry mainly; with agreeable scents of flint, balsamic notes, violet, and spices. All these fragrances make the bouquet complex and harmonic. Greatly structured, sapid and agreeably fresh. Its great acidity makes this wine very charming and elegant. The sunny vintage makes high-density tannins but never too aggressive. The result is an important and elegant wine with a long and persistent finish.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Showing the firm's hallmark of remarkable elegance, this fragrant, linear red opens with enticing scents of red berry, blue flower, rose, white pepper and crushed herb. The vibrant palate boasts compelling finesse and tension, delivering juicy red cherry, strawberry compote, star anise and a hint of tobacco. Taut refined tannins and bright acidity provide balance and seamless support. It screams out for food. Drink 2021–2029.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Le Chiuse's 2014 Brunello di Montalcino (with 7,500 bottles produced) offers a nice progression of aromas and flavors that spread easily over the palate. The primary fruit is very much intact with fresh tones of summer cherry, plum and cassis. Complexity is added thanks to subtle layers of smoke, spice and aniseed. Le Chiuse has been producing very impressive wines in recent vintages. My admiration goes to the team for a wine of this immediate character and quality, produced in one of the most challenging vintages of recent years.
Rating: 93+ -
James Suckling
The nose offers cooler blue-fruit aromas with fresh, violet-like aromas. On the palate there’s freshness and vitality that makes for attractive drinking now.
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.