Italian wine: A Tuscan vintage marking the end of an era

Swirling a small pour of his family’s namesake Brunello di Montalcino Riserva in a glass before him, Tancredi Biondi-Santi utters what may sound like sacrilege to lovers of long-aging Tuscan reds like this one. “People are always exaggerating the concept of leaving wine in the cellar,” he says. “So we release the current vintage when we think it’s ready to drink.”

The 2012 Biondi-Santi Brunello di Montalcino Riserva ($689) releasing in March will mark the first vintage the winery has held back in this way, allowing it to evolve a bit more before going into the market (typically vintages are released after reaching the six years minimum aging required for “Riserva” wines). The reason for doing so is simple: Wines that go into a cellar often get left there, overlooked, or forgotten.

By holding back its best wines until they’re already drinking well, Biondi-Santi isn’t trying to discourage consumers from cellaring their Brunellos, which will age beautifully for decades. But it does hope it will encourage more consumers to feel comfortable enjoying their wines immediately. This new release strategy is one of many subtle but significant changes taking place at this centuries-old winemaking estate.

The release of its 2012 Brunello Riserva marks something both profoundly personal to the Biondi-Santi family and outwardly relevant to the wine-consuming public. This was the last vintage produced under the patient care of Franco Biondi-Santi, grandfather of Tancredi and revered Montalcino winemaker. Franco shepherded Biondi-Santi’s genre-defining Brunello through four decades of shifting consumer tastes and changing global markets before his passing in 2013. And if one accepts—as many critics do—that Tuscany produces some of the world’s best wines, that Brunello di Montalcino is one of the best wines from Tuscany, and that Biondi-Santi is the standard-bearer for traditional Brunello, it’s fair to argue that this final vintage touched by Franco Biondi-Santi will prove one of the more special vintages released this year.

“When we speak about my grandfather, we have to speak about the style of the wine,” Tancredi says of Franco. “He was a very huge defender of this style of our Brunello, vinified in this way.”

Brunello is another name for the Tuscan clone of Sangiovese grapes (specifically “Sangiovese Grosso”) from which it is made, and it’s no overstatement to say that Biondi-Santi defines this treasured wine. Ferruccio Biondi-Santi produced the first bottle with the name “Brunello di Montalcino” on the bottle in 1888. (He was later officially recognized by the Italian government as Brunello’s creator.) At one point, the Biondi-Santis were the only family in the region producing red wines from Sangiovese. Now there are hundreds of winemakers producing Brunello di Montalcino on the slopes surrounding the hilltop town of the same name.

But while many in the region chased shifting consumer tastes toward the bigger, fruit-driven, full-bodied reds that defined the 1980s and 1990s, Franco Biondi-Santi sought to protect his family’s signature style. These lighter, silkier, more elegant Brunellos can age for a century and still drink well, as Franco proved twice in the 1990s by pouring out late-19th-century vintages for critics. Wine Spectator named the 1955 Biondi-Santi Brunello di Montalcino Riserva one of the 12 best wines of the 21st century. In 2011, an association of Italian sommeliers judged the 1964 Riserva the best Italian wine of all time.

All that presents a challenge for Tancredi and his father Jacopo—seventh and sixth generation overseers of the Biondi-Santi tradition, respectively—as they work to maintain the tradition and style of past centuries while moving the winery forward into the next one. French luxury brand EPI Group bought a majority stake in Biondi-Santi in 2016, an investment that has allowed the new generations overseeing the winery to undertake a sweeping soil analysis of its vineyards and terroir. In doing so, Biondi-Santi is gaining new data-driven insights into what makes its wine great, enabling the winery to subtly twist the knobs on both vineyard management and vinification.

“The idea here is not to make revolution, but to make evolution,” Biondi-Santi CEO Giampiero Bertolini says. That evolution includes a move toward organic viticulture and some adjustments to vineyard management. It also includes changes to the way Riserva wines are made. Produced from only the very best vintages (the 2012 Riserva is just the 39th vintage released since 1888), these wines were historically made solely with grapes from Biondi-Santi’s oldest vines, those aged 25 years or more. In 2018, armed with better data about which vineyard parcels are producing specific aromatic and flavor characteristics, the winery began sourcing grapes for its Riserva vintages from younger vines as well.

It’s but one example of the small but meaningful changes underway at Biondi-Santi, and one that makes the current 2012 vintage all the more special. Biondi-Santi Brunello di Montalcino Riserva will never be made in quite the same way ever again. Fresh, with easy tannins, a silky texture, bright red cherries and just a hint of earthiness, the 2012 Riserva is an end-of-an-era wine that will age gracefully in the cellar for decades, evolving in the bottle (and appreciating in value). Though, Tancredi reiterates, it’s absolutely ready to drink right now.

“This wine needs to move, not sit,” he says. “It certainly can sit, but it doesn’t need to.”