Best of Brunello - Altitude and Elegance
- adrianlatimer61
- 8 hours ago
- 8 min read
These days top Italian wines are famous, expensive and sought after, especially Barolo and Brunello, but even recently it was not always thus. A century and a half ago they were mainly white and unknown, and this century opened with the so-called ‘Barolo Wars’ and ‘Brunellogate’. We forget how new all this renown, quality and wealth really is.
If the road was rocky, much of the demand, and in my opinion, the problems, came from the USA. Why? Because the most esteemed critics loved wines of inky dark colour, hefty extraction and gobs of (over) ripe fruit. Caveat emptor - it can be a risky gambit to pick wine from the last century from what is now a good producer and presume it to be a great, mature example.
If you think my palate too delicate and my prejudices too traditional, let me quote Kerin O’Keefe’s book on Brunello:
‘The same scenario is repeated back to vintages from the mid-1980s: wines that upon their release had counted among the most celebrated Brunellos made by highly and consistently lauded estates, by 2007 tasted like dried up lumber marinated in moonshine.’
Too much oak, too much extraction. Tuscan Sangiovese is not Napa Cabernet. Thankfully the pendulum swings and the demand by some to be allowed to grow grapes other than Sangiovese (Grosso) was rejected and Brunello and Rosso remain native and pure. Anyone who has had the pleasure of drinking the three Rosso’s mentioned below would wonder why anyone would be stupid enough to want to grow yet more tedious international (ie French) varieties here. And if there are now vineyards planted in the wrong places, well grow something else and call it something else.
When I am faced with an extensive local wine list, I am therefore a little wary as I want to avoid the dark, chocolatey fruit bombs that still exist and generally fall apart quickly, leaving a nasty husk of tannin and not much else. Which is why I love restaurants like Albergo Il Giglio in Montalcino where the owner knows every bottle by heart and can deliver whichever style you desire. Or Locanda Franci where you can pop across the road to the Enoteca in the fortress and chose anything off their shelf with their advice, and not all are young vintages.
Otherwise, there are three top estates that I know will deliver. All are too young to have wines from the 80’s so that risk is gone, and all aim for elegance and a sense of place, refined aromatics, proper colours and lovely balance. Wines that sing, not bellow.
In the enoteca I saw shelves of Soldera at between 1,000 and 4,000 euros so I kept a very safe distance. The cheapest Stella di Campalto I could find was around 400, so that too stayed untouched. I would love to try both wines one day, but I suspect I never will, unless some tech billionaire befriends me.
But if your wallet doesn’t stretch to those two, and you like wines of purity and finesse, I have three stars for you that would feature in any top Brunello line up. In fact, they are the only estates that I have visited. And, mercifully, their prices are a little more tethered to the ground (though not cheap) and their Rosso’s are absolutely top grade and affordable. And in Italy restaurants don’t seem to work on the same enormous mark ups as in France, UK or USA, so you can find bottles for about the normal retail price. Grazie mille.
Poggio di Sotto comes from the southern sector down near Castelnuovo dell’Abate and was set up by Piero Palmucci. With glorious views over the Val d’Orcia to Monte Amiata, (the ubiquitous postcard and poster shot), he firmly stated that he’d only grow Sangiovese where it was happy and if it wasn’t suitable terroir he’d leave it alone. Hurrah. He planted a multiclonal selection and brought in Giulio Gambelli who advised minimal intervention, natural yeasts and Slavonian botti. Hurrah again. What is interesting is that he aged the Rosso for two years in wood too, made the same way as most Brunello (and tasting as good as well, and often better, you could not find a more fragrant and airier Rosso). The estate was sold to ColleMassari but as far as I can tell nothing has changed. Just lovely wines.
Visiting Pian dell’Orino always starts (for us at least) with a visit to Jan Erbach’s rose garden, his first love perhaps, where the air truly is scented. We then go into the vineyards to discuss hormones, root growth, secondary shoots and pruning, leaving top shoots unpruned, droughts, leaves naturally moving to provide shade and every aspect of grape growing and Nature’s defences against drought and disease. Even if his knowledge seems encyclopaedic to me, Jan is always experimenting and wanting to learn more. And he remains humble enough to admit when things don’t work. If you want an explanation of biodynamics that doesn’t sound like it comes from a cosmic hippy, come here.
And we end up in his experimental vineyard, Etruscan style, trying to copy the natural growth of wild vines up and around trees. It’s always an object lesson and reminder as to just how difficult and complicated it is to make wine and grow grapes. And how little I know. You need leaves for shade, but too many can cause damp to linger leading to disease; keep just one bunch outside the centre, more air, less disease, the leaves as shade. Leave the tips unharmed and use cover crops to retain moisture and provide soil life and mycelium. Follow the natural cycle and rhythm of the seasons. Prune early to get more growth so that there is more ability to cope with any ensuing drought, though this does risk earlier buds which can fall foul of spring frosts, though happily this is much less common here than in, say, Burgundy, where many now prune late precisely to avoid having precocious buds frozen to death by April frosts. The leaf cover does the hail protection as the nets that you now see often remove 30% of the light.
How often do you visit a winery and spend a couple of hours in the vineyards, not just the tasting room/cellar?
I always feel humbled in the presence of so much weather risk, especially these days when the droughts are longer and the rains too. Everything seems more extreme, and the last time we were here the neighbour (Biondi Santi) was lost in a sort of weird reddish haze – dust from the Sahara. The car needed a good wash thereafter.
As a salutary reminder, there will be no 2023 Brunello or Rosso, just an IGT bottling. Heart breaking and presumably financially disastrous too.
Mixed in with all this there are some inexplicable bonuses – the leaves in the experimental vineyard are larger, and despite global warming the alcohols are actually moderating. Does the very humid cellar (where no one is allowed entry) help? The Optical sorter (plus sorting table and preliminary selection in the vineyard) ensures such clean, high-quality grapes that sulphuring can be kept to a bare minimum.
So much care, thought and attention lead to lovely wines, refined and balanced.
Pian is up at 500m and close to town, but if you clamber up another hundred metres to the parallel road above, you come to the highest winery in the region, Le Ragnaie. Indeed if you stand overlooking the Old Vines vineyard (and the Passo del Lume Spento, the highest of all at 620m, that takes its name from the fact that the candles always blew out as it was so high and breezy) you can on a clear day see smudges on the horizon that are in fact the hills of Corsica.
This is another new estate and one that aims for freshness above all else, the Brunello often coming in at just 13.5%. Here too there will be no 2023, but they make a range of single vineyard ‘black label’ wines, both Brunello and sometimes Rosso (plus a generic white label blend). It’s a complicated mix as not every wine comes out each year as some may be declassified. The Fornace from down near Poggio is (as the name suggests - the furnace) hotter and picked weeks earlier than the two vineyards up high, or Petroso which is even closer to town (of which I think there have only been three Brunello vintages). I thought that the Casanovina Montesoli wine from the north side of the Montalcino hill would be cooler, but in fact it’s lower in altitude and misses the sea breezes so in fact it’s warmer and picked earlier.
As said, it’s difficult to pin these wines down as there is no standard single vineyard vintage selection, but they surely succeed with attaining freshness and a lovely weight and lift for their wines. The Vigna Vecchia has 50 extra years of old vine concentration and the Passo, which used to be banned from making Brunello as it was considered too high to be able to ripen, reminds me of Poggio in its floral elegance and enticing bouquet.
We tasted all three, the 2014 Poggio di Sotto and Pian dell’Orino Vigneti del Versante (their blended Brunello) and the 2017 and 2018 Le Ragnaie Passo. I think all were 13.5%. 2014 was a challenging vintage that was often declassified, but here were two Brunello’s in fine form, fully mature and the Pian getting quite meaty, but still with a freshness of fruit and aromatics. I wouldn’t keep them, but I’d very happily drink them now over many more heralded, ‘bigger’ vintages.
The two Passo’s were both a delight, the 2018 perhaps being the pick of the bunch, with a heady floral bouquet and fruit that was deliciously ripe, almost sweet but not at all cloying. And, like all 4 wines, with a pleasingly elegant weight. Almost too easy to drink.
When tasting Jan’s recent releases, I hesitantly asked if it was not too insulting to link his wines to the red fruit and rose aromas and weightless body of some fine Burgundies.
He just smiled.
Postscript - ‘The Wine in My Glass’
‘Loving this wine memoir from Adrian Latimer. A must for those who love great stories and writing, albeit primarily about wine. And it’s all in a good cause. All profits go to the Vendanges Solidaires association which helps winemakers who are suffering due to extreme weather conditions…’
Hermione Ireland, Managing Director Academie du Vin Library
After some encouragement and a fair few blog posts, I published (Sept 2025) a book about my travels in the wine world - the people, places and, of course, wines. I am not a professional, so everything I say is objective and unbiased (so I can criticise when other journalists do not dare to do so for instance) and any profits will go to the Vendanges Solidaires association which was set up in 2016 to help winemakers who are in trouble after suffering the extreme weather conditions (frost, hail, fire, flood etc) which sadly are becoming ever more frequent: www.vendangessolidaires.com.
The book ranges from California to Sicily, via Salta, Jujuy and Patagonia in Argentina, Valtellina, Piemonte and Tuscany in Italy, Madeira and of course all over France (Burgundy, Chablis, Sancerre, Beaujolais, Bordeaux, the Rhone).
If you have found any pleasure and/or interest in this blog, I think you might enjoy it, especially as it has been brilliantly illustrated by Arabella Langlands-Perry who managed to juggle bringing up two young kids, helping run Maceo/Willi’s Wine Bar in Paris and producing artwork with an abundance of both talent and wit. Brava.
‘The Wine in My Glass – Tales of Wines, Winemakers and Places’
Published by The Medlar Press Limited, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, autumn 2025. www.medlarpress.com
Available from Medlar in UK, and/or from me in France or Willis Wine Bar in Paris.
Price UK Pounds 26 from Medlar or 35 Euros. All profits to charity.
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