Rosso di Montalcino: ripe for discovery
One of an elite band of top-quality red wines in Italy that can only be made from a single grape variety, Rosso di Montalcino warrants its own place in the spotlight. Monty Waldin introduces the region and its wines
On average, an email a week arrives from friends or wine-trade insiders asking for tips about Montalcino, because this is where the Italian side of my family is from. Almost without exception they want names of the best producers of Brunello di Montalcino, Montalcino’s flagship 100% Sangiovese red wine, and recommendations of the best places to eat. Rarely do they ask about Rosso di Montalcino, despite the fact that it comes from exactly the same 100% Sangiovese vineyards as Brunello, but costs around one third of the price.
Rosso di Montalcino is one of Italy’s greatest 100% varietal red wines – the others being Barolo and Barbaresco (both 100% Nebbiolo), Aglianico del Vulture Riserva and Brunello di Montalcino.
You can find other 100% Sangiovese red wines further north, in the Chianti Classico DOCG and Romagna DOC regions, but both also permit other Italian and international grapes in the wine. As a result, you can never be sure what flavours or mouthfeel these wines might show.
Not so for Rosso di Montalcino. It’s 100% Sangiovese or bust.
A proposal in 2011 to allow Rosso di Montalcino to include grapes other than Sangiovese – meaning French ones such as Merlot, Cabernet, Petit Verdot or Syrah – was sensibly voted down by Montalcino’s wine producers.
Rosso can be said to have two roles. As a lodestar, it gives you the most obvious indication of how good the pricier Brunello might be if you are thinking of investing in one. This is useful because Brunello is exceptionally hard to make well. Sangiovese needs softish hands in the winery, yet Brunello demands Sangiovese endure a 48 month-long obstacle course before bottling, with potential pitfalls – including over-oaking (24 months in oak is mandatory) or less-than-perfect oak hygiene – which inevitably compromise fruit flavours.
As Rosso di Montalcino can be bottled unoaked, it allows Sangiovese the chance to be a more faithful transmitter of the changes in flavour and texture exerted by Montalcino’s multi-faceted landscape on the resulting wines.
Imagine Montalcino as a clockface shaped like a four-sided pyramid with the town itself as the peak a bit north of middle centre (I did say imagine…)
Regional styles
At 1 o’clock, in Montalcino’s extreme northeast, lies Torrenieri, a lower-lying, clayey area some distance from the town. Torrenieri’s best Rossos have a succulent mouthfeel, perfumed fruit and usually reward drinking within two to four years (assume Brunello would age for roughly at least three times as long, for this and following indications).
From 2 to 4 o’clock the vineyards are much closer to the town, and at higher altitudes of 430m-500m. This is Montalcino’s prized eastern flank, providing mouthwateringly smooth Rossos with the substance to age and improve for a decade in bottle.
Continue south to 5 o’clock to reach the hamlet of Castelnuovo dell’Abate, a hot but rarely blistering area, whose Rossos combine plump fruit with the kind of mouthfeel that suggests you’ve headed into baby Brunello territory.
At 6 o’clock is Sesta, a hotspot with dry rocky topsoils over subsoil that can hold on to enough rainwater to keep the vines from stressing. The result is a flexible style of Rosso which drinks beautifully when young, but which develops just as beautifully in bottle (three to seven years).
At 7 o’clock we hit the hottest, driest Montalcino zone, which is called Sant’Angelo. This area comprises both the hilltop hamlet of Sant’Angelo in Colle and the lower lying vales around the hamlet of Sant’Angelo Scalo. The topography helps draw in hot breezes direct from the Mediterranean (Tyrrhenian Sea) to the west. This creates Rossos with rich, exuberant fruit and slightly higher alcohol levels than in the other zones, and wines with plenty of colour. They drink well very young, but the best also reward two to about seven years in bottle.
At 8 o’clock, the little hand touches Argiano and its slightly lower lying neighbouring areas of Tavernelle and Santa Restituta. West-facing sites here get both hot Mediterranean winds and full afternoon sun. Vines need to spend time digging into the clay to find the moisture and minerals they need to thrive.
The best wines here show piercing, ethereal fruit allied to a generous but not heavy mouthfeel. In the nearby Camigliano zone, a little further west in the direction of the Mediterranean, the wines show an interesting briney note, from the local soils rather than from incoming sea breezes.
As the short hand sweeps from 9 o’clock to midnight, it passes a few,
isolated vineyards in wooded or more open but relatively low-lying areas out towards the region’s northern boundary, such as Castiglione dei Boschi, Abbadia Ardenga Abbazia and around Altesi. Though not widely planted with vines, this broad, often clayey arc gives brisk, savoury Rossos combining digestibility and early drinkability.
Closer to the centre of our clock, there are also a multitude of vineyards on and around the slopes of the town of Montalcino itself (at 300m-500m), in areas such as Canalicchio and Montosoli to the north and Passo del Lume Spento to the south. Rossos show intensity and longevity in the best years from hot days and cool nights, although moist, morning harvest-time fogs around the northern foothills can compromise grape health if yields are pushed too hard.
Complex yet simple
One of the reasons Rosso now appears to have come of age is that the flood of new estates created by the last influx of new arrivals in the late 1990s (following a smaller but equally influential wave in the early 1970s) now draw their wines from a core of fully mature vines (Montalcino’s vineyard area has been fairly static since 2003), and the owners are much more experienced. They are clearer in their minds now as to which plots, or parts of plots, are best-suited to Rosso di Montalcino rather than Brunello di Montalcino, and also know which plots may go either way depending on the season.
Remember that Italy in general, and Montalcino in particular, is rarely very flat – the result of both ancient and ongoing volcanic-tectonic crumpling. The skyline of Montalcino is overshadowed by mainland Italy’s highest volcanic peak, Mount Amiata. The resultant folds in the landscape create huge variations in how much water, light and heat the local Sangiovese vines get, with climate change’s unpredictable new joker now also part of the mix.
Sangiovese ripens at its leisurely best with sensible yields, an absence of heat stress and the right balance of direct sunlight and dappled shade.
All this dictates how best suited any particular Sangiovese plot will be either to Rosso di Montalcino or Brunello, and if Rosso whether it will also benefit from some form of oak before bottling.
Other winemakers prefer to wait to make the ‘should this Sangiovese be a Rosso or Brunello’ decision until after all the newly fermented wines can be tasted and graded.
Overall, the majority of Rossos see little or no oak ageing. This is why mistaking a producer’s Brunello for a Rosso will win you few friends.
Yet the best of the oak-aged Rossos really are like baby Brunellos – not because of the oak, but because of the quality of their underyling fruit.
And yet the most potentially magnetic contemporary Rossos come from producers working single terroirs and eschewing oak, allowing more of Montalcino’s terroir jigsaw to fall into place.
And perhaps to provide new lines of inquiry for my regular email interlocutors, once the message gets through. Monty Waldin is a widely published wine writer, author and Decanter World Wine Awards Regional Chair for Tuscany