The most-debated vintage from this estate: Vinous and Wine Enthusiast both awarded 97 points, while Wine Spectator stopped at 88. A wine that divides its tasters.
Medium-deep ruby with garnet edges. The nose is exotic and spicy: sour cherry and wild strawberry, dried flowers, and behind them fine tobacco, leather, undergrowth and brown spice. On the palate the wine is midweight and mobile, delicate without being fragile, with a core of sweet red fruit around which supple, chalky tannins settle. There is a savoury, almost balsamic thread — olive, dried tomato — recalling the classic Montalcino style. The finish is fresh and lightly firm. Drinking window 2024 to 2035; ready now, and two hours of decanting helps. Lovely with roast poultry, mushrooms or a classic bistecca.
In Montalcino, grandparents call their granddaughters potazzine, after the small, brightly coloured birds of the Tuscan countryside. That is what their grandmother called Viola and Sofia, the daughters of owner Gigliola Giannetti — and the estate grew in step with them: Viola was born in 1993, the founding year, and when Sofia arrived in 1996 two more hectares took the total to five.
The Brunello is made traditionally here: a spontaneous fermentation of forty-two days on the estate's own wild yeasts, without temperature control, followed by forty-two months in casks of 30 and 50 hectolitres of Slavonian oak from Garbellotto. Unfiltered.
The producer describes 2018 as a year with rain in August that called for leaf removal, followed by a beautiful September with wide day-night ranges.
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