Winemaker Notes
#44 Jeb Dunnuck Top 100 of 2025
The wine displays a ruby red color with garnet hints and a very intense, complex nose featuring ripe red fruits such as cherry and black cherry, set against a spicy and fresh backdrop of sweet tobacco and aromatic herbs with notes of clove and baking spice. The palate is smooth and well-rounded, with excellent structure, sweet, integrated tannins, and a long, mineral, and fruity finish.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2020 Brunello Di Montalcino is one of the standouts of the vintage and is a youthful ruby/magenta color. On the nose, it's floral and perfumed with aromas of violets, black cherries, graphite, rosemary, and fresh sage. It's seamless on the palate, with a weightless feel in a medium to full-bodied frame, and has plush tannins, refreshing acidity, and a haunting finish. This stunning wine should drink well over the next 20 years.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
I tasted the Salvioni 2020 Brunello di Montalcino La Cerbaiola at the winery with Giulio Salvioni and his daughter Alessia after a long walk in the vineyards on a crisp autumn morning. There were a couple of really cute dogs running around as well. This is a gorgeous expression, and it is so important to see the vines and soils when considering a wine like this. Schistic galestro with quartz give this Brunello elegant mineral tones that frame a core of wild fruit and pressed violet. The wine shows that pretty pinch of citrus or blood orange that you often get with classical Sangiovese. The style is bright, transparent and finely polished.
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Vinous
The 2020 Brunello di Montalcino seduces from the glass with a complex and layered bouquet as pine shavings and mint lift black raspberry aromas. It features a bouquet with whiffs of dried orange peels, saddle leather and Tuscan dust. This hovers across the palate, graceful and serene, casting a silken feel and remaining seemingly weightless and refined. It showcases ripe red and hints of blue fruit complemented by violet inner florals. The energy within is spellbinding, especially when combined with the sapidity of its fruit. The 2020 tapers off long and fresh, with sweet tannins that make for a perfect punctuation to the experience. Salvioni found a beautiful balance in the 2020 vintage that shows no sign of the warm conditions one might expect.
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Decanter
Encircled by woodlands, Salvioni’s four hectares lie on a plateau at 420 metres above sea level, tilting gently to the southeast. The 2020 expresses the warmth and ripeness of the vintage while preserving intrinsic sense of place. A fragrant panoply of Mediterranean herbs, forest undergrowth and cardamom leads into earthy depths on the palate. Precisely chiselled chalky tannins bolster layers of wild berries admirably. Structure is securely at the fore here, assuring a good stint in the cellar. The protracted finish of liquorice root and juniper corroborates that there is more to come.
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.