The best wine tasting in Italy
It's not where you think
We had friends in town the other week, and we spent a few days doing one of my favorite things. I.e. exploring a new scenic wine region. Now, I’ve discovered after visiting many regions and many tastings that there is something to love in every new wine destination. The vineyards are picturesque, the countryside is lovely, the food tends to be excellent, and the wine is, of course, the star.
However, in some regions you feel like you’re being handled by a junior salesperson, forced to endure a long tour and tasting for only a few scant sips of the flagship wine (no one really wants your Napa Sauvignon Blanc, or Malbec), with a membership club form shoving in front of your face as you drink.
In others, the current release wines are far too young to drink (I’m looking at you, Rioja), so you’re sipping a tight, tannic glass of red, trying to ignore the sandpaper sensation on your tongue while you attempt to imagine what it will taste like in ten years.
While I can always find things to enjoy, between the scenery, the food, the architecture, and the generally warm, fuzzy feeling of a day spent drinking wine with friends, it’s amazing when a tasting comes together that delivers on all fronts – great wine, ready to drink, explained by true experts, in a picturesque region accompanied by excellent food.
Florence is located in the rolling hills of Tuscany, and while I enjoy Chiantis and Supertuscans, I’ve discovered a new, special corner of the region that trumps all the rest.
Enter Montalcino and specifically, the excellent wine Brunello di Montalcino. It is made from the Sangiovese Grosso clone of the Sangiovese grape. It must be aged at least two years in oak and can be sold starting five years after production, or six years for riservas.
This meant that for our tasting, the current releases were 2019s and 2020s, and we tried reservas as far back as 2015. Given that the ideal drinking window for Brunello is 8-16 years, we were almost at the perfect timing, and it showed in the wine. The tannins had started to soften, but the wine was still very expressive. The wines improved with time in the glass, and could age for another five to ten years, but were extremely enjoyable at the tasting.
Almost two hours south of Florence, Montalcino was far enough that we escaped the crowds. Montalcino is a lovely hill town, complete with the requisite winding streets, piazzas, church and fort. It was having a Renaissance festival the weekend we left, and we saw the flags going up to mark the different quarters of the town. There was a very cool wine bar inside the old fort, and there were great jogging and walking paths nearby.
October ended up being a great time to visit. The weather was a bit cool and moody, which proved perfect conditions for sipping red wine indoors, and the fall foliage was on full display. We found ourselves wandering alone through the excellent old town, walking into the best restaurants without reservations, and chatting up wine bar owners.
We spent hours at Le Chiuse sipping wine with the extremely interesting owner and wine maker and saw him on our run the next morning.
Another vineyard, Argiano, featured an English garden and a spectacular art museum, and some of the best food I’ve ever had at a vineyard.
At Poggia di Soto, we saw the specificity of the wine harvesting and the obsession with quality – they hand harvest, test grapes from the front and back of bunches and from different spots along each row of vines, and harvest partial clusters if all the grapes in one cluster are not yet ready.
In the past, we’ve spent time in wine regions where you choose between three differently priced options at the tasting room while the new hire reads from a card about the wines you’re about to try. This felt personal. No one was pointing to a steel tank and reciting from a script. They knew the answers to our questions because they made the wine. The people we spoke with were intimately involved in the harvest, the history, and the production of the wine.
Most of all, it was the quality of the wine that stunned us. Every vineyard was better than the last, and this impression has held up as we’ve sampled Brunello next to other wines back in Florence.
