Grape Jane
Brunello di Montalcino 2016, Saporoia Baccinetti, red wine
Brunello di Montalcino 2016, Saporoia Baccinetti, red wine
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Brunello di Montalcino 2016, Saporoia Baccinetti, red wine
This Baccinetti Brunello di Montalcino Saporoia 2016 will tick all the classic boxes with aromas of scorched earth, black-skinned fruit and tobacco. Now that scorched earth might sound a bit distasteful but trust Jane, you'll be thrilled. The concentrated palate shows ripe black plum, liqorice and clove alongside chewy tannins. Jane loves to say, "this Brunello will bring you back to cozy Christmas days or your best Italian Holiday moments".
Due to the dense tannins this Brunello loves a proper decanting, so take your grandma's crystal glasses out of the closet and make it a feast!
Decant and drink now or save till 2023 - 2029
A box contains 6 bottles
Jane's recommendation: Everything Italian taste delicious with this Brunello. Think of a full Antipasti plate littered with cured meats, salted cheeses, nuts, figs and some olives. It really goes well with a mature parmesan cheese or a pasta with some spice. If you're into meat this Brunello pairs well with big protein ladened dishes; lamb (stew), deer, beef and any steak. Try to avoid pairing with dishes where the wine would overwhelm flavours, such as leafy greens and subtly seasoned meats.
Critic tasting note: "Underbrush, botanical-herb and tobacco aromas mingle together on this solid, no-frills red. On the palate, dried cherry, prune and licorice are set against assertive, grainy tannins that leave a rather raspy, mouthdrying close. Kerin O’Keefe" - 88/100, Wine Enthusiast
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.