The buzz surrounding the 2010 vintage of Brunello di Montalcino has confirmed the Southern Tuscan DOCG’s elevation into the pantheon of Italian wines, alongside Chianti Classico, Barolo, Barbaresco, Amarone and Bolgheri.
And yet, only a few decades ago, Montalcino was the poorest hilltop town in Tuscany; being born into a winegrowing family here typically meant scratching a living from a few rows of vines, and supplementing that meagre income with other crops, animals – whatever you could sell.
Transformation
Visit Caprili, located slap-bang in the middle of the Montalcino appellation, and you see a microcosm of the region’s recent transformation. There’s a shiny new winery with the capacity to handle 30 ha of production – Caprili currently has 21 ha, 18 ha of it Brunello – which opened in time for the 2014 harvest. But the Bartolommei family owners spent most of the first half of the twentieth century as sharecroppers, moving from farmhouse to farmhouse on the Villa Santa Restituta estate, before finally scraping together enough money to buy Caprili in 1965.
Alfo Bartolommei planted his first vineyard – less than a hectare, with mixed varieties – in the same year. At the time, says Giacomo Bartolommei, Alfo’s grandson and Caprili’s sales manager, “Brunello was just an idea”, and many thought Montalcino would be subsumed into Chianti. Fifty years later, Caprili’s prime site – 330 metres up, with cooling winds from the coast and a high proportion of the prized, mineral-heavy galestro soils – makes this one of the region’s producers to watch. Caprili’s first vintage of Brunello, 1978, came to market in 1983, and that original vineyard – aptly named Madre – still supplies clonal material for new plantings.
Several factors have conspired to lift Brunello’s fortunes over the past few decades – most notably, the arrival of Banfi at the end of the 1970s and the hype (now repeated with 2010) surrounding the 1997 vintage. In 2013, Winesearcher.com named two Montalcino producers, Biondi-Santi and Gianfranco Soldera, among its top 10 most expensive Italian wine producers. Biondi-Santi’s Tenuta il Greppo Riserva and Soldera’s Case Basse Brunello Riserva are routinely among the top-grossing Italian wine lots at auction.
Banfi, an American company with Italian origins through the Mariani family, came south to Montalcino in the 1970s in a bid to repeat the success of Riunite Lambrusco. Launched in 1967, medium-sweet Riunite became the biggest-selling imported wine in the US six years later, peaking at 11.5m cases in 1985 thanks in part to a successful ad campaign under the slogan Riunite on ice, that’s nice. This was still the time of Montalcino’s obscurity, when, according to a local source, vineyards changed hands “for nothing” and Banfi was able to pick up 3,000 ha and a castle for a reputed sum of $20m. In an attempt to repeat Riunite’s success, the Marianis planted 400 ha of Moscatel to make a sweet wine – but it bombed. The Moscatel was ripped out in favour of Sangiovese; in 2015, good vineyard land costs as much as €500,000.00 per hectare.
Banfi remains the largest Brunello producer, followed by Frescobaldi-owned Castelgiocondo, Col d’Orcia and Camigliano. Antinori and Gaja have operations here, and a multitude of start-ups have joined the fray over the past two decades.
But the strength of Banfi isn’t the only factor behind the growth of Brunello stateside, says Lance Montalto, senior executive wine specialist/buyer, Wally’s Wine & Spirits. “America’s obsession with Brunello, I believe, stems more from Americans travelling to Tuscany and wanting that which is considered the best,” he says. “Very few wines pair as well as Brunello with grilled beef – and Americans love a grilled rib-eye.”
Montalcino’s unstinting focus on Sangiovese – it’s the only variety allowed in Brunello or Rosso di Montalcino production – is also touted as a positive, contrasting with the incursion of international varieties in, say, Chianti.
To Alex Pinski, head of purchasing department at importer DP-Trade in Russia, this has “only raised interest in the appellation”, and successive votes in the region have strongly rejected the idea of change.
In 2008, 85% of consorzio members voted against allowing alternative varieties to be used for Brunello or junior appellation Rosso di Montalcino, and in 2012, some 98% rejected the idea of changing the rules for Rosso alone. “Now, with the 2010 vintage, I think there is no way of changing back, because the rating [of the wines] has been so great,” says Giacomo Bartolommei.
But Montalto wonders if the grape variety issue is important to the American consumer anyway. “A perfect example was the 2004 Brunello scandal, where wineries were accused of adulterating their Brunello with Cabernet and other varietals,” he says. “In Italy, it was massive news that March, when the story broke. In the US, almost noone had heard of the issue, and noone really cared. If the wine that was reviewed was the wine in the bottle and it was good, that is all that mattered.”
Pinski says that there’s great interest in Russia in Brunello, even though his company hasn’t yet released all of its Brunello labels onto the market yet. The success of Argiano Brunello di Montalcino 2010 raised awareness, he adds, although “we prefer to hold it for as long as possible in the cellar until stock of the ’09 vintage is exhausted.” Some Brunello producers have raised their prices, while others are holding steady; regardless, says Pinski, the collapse of the rouble means the Russian market is very difficult generally.
The challenges
The rapturous reception given to the 1997 vintage prompted a huge increase in plantings, starting in 1999 and ending in 2009, by which time production had doubled to 12m bottles a year. This was slightly alleviated by the introduction of stricter yields, but concerns remain that expansion went too far, too fast, with the quality of new vineyards and producers patchy.
“It has grown too much, with vines being planted in areas that are far from ideal if the aim is to make top-quality wines,” argues David Gleave MW, managing director of Liberty Wines in the UK. “All you need to do is drive through the zone and look at the vigour and viticulture, and you quickly realise how important the site is to the production of top-quality Brunello.”
Montalto agrees, but believes the quality of 2010 could provide a turning-point. “Young wine producers that were upstarts a decade ago now know how to work their land for the best results, and they have become talented winemakers,” he says. “Also, many producers are using better clonal selections of Sangiovese. They had begun a massive replanting and regrafting project in the early 2000s, and those grapes are now coming to fruition to produce world-class wines.”
The flipside of expanding production is increasing diversity, from the heat of southern Montalcino in the shadow of Monte Amiata, to the cooler north.
This has prompted calls for the zoning of Montalcino into sub-regions and crus, similar to what has happened in Barolo and Barbaresco. While some sites have risen to prominence anyway – Altesino’s Montosoli vineyard, for instance – supporters argue it would cement the diversity of Brunello in people’s minds.
Gleave believes it should “definitely” happen, and Montalto agrees. “There should be a focus on villages and sub-zones, akin to Chianti and Barolo,” he says. “It helps define terroir and regional style.”
There are currently no concrete plans, and producers remain split on the issue. “I think there are different areas in Montalcino and they react in different ways,” says Guido Orzalesi, in charge of sales and marketing at Altesino. “The debate hinges on the size of the winery. It looks like the bigger wineries are scared of that, because they are scared that one area might be thought better than the other. On the other hand, I’m scared that the final consumer will be confused.”
Whatever the long-term consequences of Brunello’s current success, price rises are a more immediate concern. While some producers with high ratings for their 2010 wines are cashing in, the effect is trickling down to bulk wine prices too.
Until a few years ago, these were typically €7.00 ($7.84) to €7.50 per litre; between November 2014 and June 2015, prices leapt from €10.00 per litre to €15.00 to €16.00 per litre, while bulk stocks of 2010 are practically non-existent.
The reaction to this new impetus behind Montalcino will be interesting to watch in the coming years. Renewed plantings? The classification of sub-zones? The resurrection of the grape variety debate? Wary of the over-planting of the 2000s and somewhat hamstrung by the stuttering Italian economy, producers are more cautious than they were amid the hyping of the ‘97s. But there’s little sign that Brunello’s rising star will be on the wane any time soon.
Views from the markets
Lance Montalto,
senior executive wine specialist/buyer, Wally’s Wine & Spirits, US
I first started hearing about the vintage five years ago and, by Vinitaly 2011, the word was already out that this might be the finest vintage of Brunello to date. I began tasting barrel samples immediately after the fair and, for the next three years, my assessment then and even more now is that this is a remarkable vintage, unlike any young vintage I have tasted prior. As for customer response, I have never seen anything like [it] outside of perhaps 2005 Bordeaux futures. The momentum keeps building and with many Brunellos we are not able to get enough of any one wine to supply the demand. The prices of the 2010s are at a low in the market. With Italy’s massive financial issues, producers want to sell wine, so very few houses have taken any price increase in almost five years. Also factor [in that] the euro is lower than it has been in years at an average of $1.15 exchange; the 2010 Brunellos are among the greatest wine values on the planet.
David Gleave MW,
managing director, Liberty Wines, UK
At the top end of the market for Italian reds, Brunello perhaps lost ground [in the UK] to the fashionably big and rich “Super Tuscan” styles in the past. Today, however, rather than being “put off” by Brunello, the growing interest being shown by UK consumers in indigenous varieties, more restrained styles and trading up to higher-quality wines as they look to “drink less and drink better”, bodes well for its future. We feel that Brunello currently offers some of the best value on the fine wine market as prices have risen only slowly over the past decade, despite a run of good vintages. We have seen a 19.4% increase in our Brunello sales to the on-trade by volume (MAT to end June 2015 versus last year) as sommeliers confidently list and sell top-end Tuscan wines, while our off-trade sales for the same period have almost doubled.
