A vintage year for Brunello

The Montalcino region has faced some problems in the past, but these days local winemakers can accentuate the positive. By Tim Atkin MW

Picture credit: Tim Atkin MW

AFTER THE front-page scandals that have affected Italy’s most famous wine town in recent years, the 2014 Benvenuto Brunello tasting was reassuringly lowkey.

The ructions caused by Brunellogate, when a number of producers were found guilty of illegally blending other grapes with Sangiovese, and the more recent expulsion (or was it resignation?) from the local Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino of Gianfranco Soldera, the DOCG’s most controversial winemaker, were forgotten in favour of something more positive and immediate: the quality of the 2009 vintage. We already knew about the official position on 2009: it was worth four stars.

One of the strange things about Montalcino is that the Consorzio rates the vintage a few months after it has ended but doesn’t allow producers to sell the wine, or journalists and the trade to taste bottled samples, for another four years.

The ratings don’t mean much, to be honest. Every year since 2002, a rainaffected vintage when several high profile names declassified their entire production, has been given four or five stars.

2009, according to the Consorzio, is on a par with 2003, 2005, 2008, 2011 and 2013, just below the five star vintages of 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2010. REAL DEAL Local politics aside, we should be grateful for one thing: the wines presented at Benvenuto Brunello are always bottled.

Given the controversy that continues to surround the preparation of “special” samples during Bordeaux en primeur week, it is reassuring to know that, whatever their qualitative ups and downs, all the wines at Benvenuto Brunello are genuine. This is true in two senses.

Not only are they a true, bottled reflection of the vintage, give or take the perfectly legal addition of 15% of wine from a previous year, but they are made entirely from Sangiovese in purezza.

The days when Sangiovese was routinely blended with Merlot and other grapes (in 2010, the president of the Consorzio, Ezio Rivella, claimed that 80% of all Brunello was “not pure Sangiovese”) are over.

The fines are too great, the policing too stringent for people to risk cheating any more. And what of the 2009 growing season? It has been described in some quarters as a hot vintage, a little like 2003 and 2007.

But this is only part of the story. The first half of the year was unusually wet. This helped to create reserves of water in the soil – useful in the drier, southern areas of the DOCG – but it also promoted disease pressure. “We had thin skins because of the rain in spring,” according to Franco Pacenti of Canalicchio di Sopra,“and less colour and extract in the finished wines.

These are not wines for long ageing.” Summer was hot, especially in August, when temperatures hit 38°C, but as more than one producer pointed out, summers in Montalcino invariably are these days. (Average temperatures in the region have increased by 1°C in the last 30 years.)

Some vineyards suffered from stress caused by dehydration and drought, which resulted in alcohol levels over 15% in certain wines.

SUN AND RAIN

The summer heat wave also meant that the cooler zones to the north of the town had an advantage in terms of achieving freshness and balance in their wines.

Selection was important, both in the vineyard and the winery, partly because of some rain in September and October, but also because of shrivelling. Maurizio Lambardi says: “We had to work hard to make a good wine.” The result, he adds, are “fairly simple wines, perfect for easy drinking and a short life”.

Maurizio Lambardi, Lambardi. Picture credit: Tim Atkin MW

Simone Biliorsi of Fornacina agrees that it was a tricky year in the winery. “You had to pay a lot of attention during fermentation and ageing.” Or, to put it another way, it was a year when “the human factor was important”, according to Stefano Colombini of Barbi. One crucial decision was when to pick.

Sangiovese’s natural acidity is an important factor in terms of ageing potential and it was at a premium in 2009. “The real danger was waiting for too long,” says Filippo Paoletti of Lisini. “Ripeness and sugar accumulation happened quite quickly, so I picked early in the last week of September.

In 2010 I was one of the last to pick, but not in 2009. I don’t mind sacrificing colour and alcohol to retain acidity.” Federico Staderini of Poggio di Sotto says that the absence of diurnal variation in the last month of the growing season was “unusual and very dramatic”.

A number of top producers, including Fuligni, Conti Costanti, Ciacci Piccolomini, Col d’Orcia, Uccelliera and, most vocally of all, Gaja (Pieve Santa Restituta) didn’t make Riservas or single vineyard wines in 2009.

“We picked early in 2009,” comments Gaia Gaja, “but we were affected by the warm winds at the end of August and in September. It was difficult to make wines with less than 15% alcohol.

The grapes were just too ripe.” Despite all this, it’s difficult to generalise about vintages in Montalcino, largely because the region is so varied in terms of topography, rainfall, average temperatures, altitude and soil type. Put simply, some vineyards and sub-regions do better in certain vintages than they do in others.

In much cooler 2008, it was the warmer sites that tended to be more successful, whereas the opposite was true in 2009.

As Tenuta Greppo’s Jacopo Biondi Santi puts it: “There is no one Montalcino.” Styles varied widely in 2009, just as they did in 2008. The 2009s are generally riper, as you’d expect, but there are always significant differences between individual producers, depending on where they source their grapes from, as well as how they make and age their wines.

“Both 2008 and 2009 are less homogenous and more producerspecific,” says Andrea Costanti of Conti Costanti. “It’s very hard to give a star rating for the whole area.”

Franco Pacenti, Canalicchio. Picture credit: Tim Atkin MW

ZONE QUESTION

This leads us to the contentious subject of sub-zones. Now that illegal blending is no longer a subject of local disagreement, zonazionehas the potential to fill its place. Should the consorzio commission a study of the region’s vineyards, with a view to establishing a series of subappellations that would appear on labels, along the lines of the different Chianti zones?

To some it’s madness; to others it’s long overdue: a step that would confirm Montalcino’s standing as Tuscany’s leading wine region.

There is no denying that Montalcino’s 2,100 hectares of Brunello are far from uniform. You can drive from the north to the south of the region in less than an hour, but the two are very different in terms of vegetation, soil types and temperature.

The existence of a range of terroirs (in the broadest sense of the term) is one reason why a number of wineries relish the chance to blend across the region. A (non exhaustive) list of wellknown producers who do just this includes Gianni Brunelli, Collemattoni, Le Potazzine, Caparzo, Siro Pacenti, Pian dell’Orino, Fornacella, Fornacina and Casanova di Neri.

The most vocal supporters of official sub-zones are journalists rather than producers, but they have a point.

The American expert, Kerin O’Keefe, makes a strong case for seven different sub-zones in her book Brunello di Montalcino. On the producer side, the Sangiovese Per Amico group (made up of Jan-Hendrik Erbach of Pian dell’Orino, Stella di Campalto and Francesco Leanza of Salicutti) have identified eight major soil types in Montalcino, which don’t always coincide with O’Keefe’s sub-zones.

Clearly, more work is needed. Sub-zones are more relevant in lesser vintages like 2009 and 2008 than they are in great ones like 2006, 2004, 2001 and 1999, when every corner of Montalcino tends to make excellent Brunellos.

Fortunately, the next vintage to be released, in February 2015, will be 2010, by general consensus one of the greatest ever harvests. Better to agree on that than to disagree about zonazione.

Montalcino has suffered more than enough scandals already.

• Tim Atkin MW’s in-depth 2014 Brunello report will be published on 15 May on timatkin.com
• All photos in this article courtesy of Tim Atkin MW