The tasting note described above does not justice this wine enough though. There is a lot to discover.

Some notes of Jane's friends: "elegant cherries, figs, a bit of jam", "some eucalyptus, toasted pine nuts, leather, cedar and oak."  "Ripe on the nose with figs, walnuts, toasted pine nuts and melted caramel. Amazing aftertaste that lasts for a long time. Sit down, enjoy and hopefully you bought a box ;-)

A box contains 6 bottles

If you ever wanted a Brunello di Montalcino for your cellar to age for decades, then buy the 2016 vintage when the wines come out in the market in January 2021. The 2016 vintage marks the second great year in a row for Brunello di Montalcino following the sensational 2015.

“These are wines for your cellar,” said Lamberto Frescobaldi, the head of the Florentine wine family that owns Castelgiocondo, a solid Brunello di Montalcino estate. “The tannins and structure are really special.”

Indeed, I tasted 212 Brunello di Montalcino 2016s in my tasting room in Hong Kong and the young sangioveses certainly do have a lot of tannins. In fact, I have never seen so much tannin in a young Brunello and I have been tasting young vintages from Montalcino since the early 1980s. I honestly wonder if the wines have much more tannin than 2015 or they just don’t have as much fruit to cover up their phenolic structure. But the 2016s are very impressive.

In my tasting of 2016s, I kept writing at the end of the tasting note, “try after 2024” or “better after 2025.” These drink recommendations are certainly longer than the 2015s. The 2015s are much easier to drink young but they have the structure and concentration to age for decades just like the 2016s. The slightly hotter growing season during the summer in 2015 gave the wines that added level of ripe fruit in addition to the ripe tannins.

As I wrote in the fall of 2018 in Tuscany after tasting a few hundred barrel samples, the 2015 grape growing season was clearly hotter with less difference between the heat of the day and the coolness of the night. So the wines tend to be very fruity, sometimes even exotic. In 2016, there was greater diurnal temperature variation, which explains why the acidities are a little higher in the wines and the characters slightly less opulent. But don’t get me wrong, there’s a subtleness to the top 2015s that make them irresistible.

“These are clearly two great vintages,” admitted Carlo Ferrini, the well-respected consulting enologists who has his own small estate in Montalcino called Giodo. I rated both his 2015 and 2016 wines 100 points. “They are terrific young Brunellos.”

I like to say that 2016 would be the greatest vintage ever for Brunello if it weren’t for the stupendous 2015. In fact, you can easily see the difference in personality and nature when you taste the two together, as I did when I also rated almost 100 2015 Brunellos last week. Most were 2015 Brunello riservas. And they showed the opulence, plush fruit and ripe tannins like the classic bottlings I tasted last fall before their release in January 2020.

Brunello di Montalcino is a red DOCG Italian wine produced in the vineyards surrounding the town of Montalcino, in the province of Siena, located about 80 km south of Florence in the Tuscany wine region.

From Tuscany in central Italy, Brunello enjoys a distinction as one of Italy's most favoured wines.

Brunello ages well and is great for collecting. The wine is bold, rich, and full-bodied. Red and black fruit assertively grace the nose and palate. 

Brunello is made totally from Sangiovese grapes that take on the characteristics of the soil, vegetation and climate of the region in which it is grown. Only in Montalcino, they call the grape 'Brunello' which means blood of Jupiter.

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