The Wine Guardian

Description

Il Marroneto's 2016 Brunello di Montalcino is a delicate and heavenly, perfumed beauty. Roses mix with lilac and violets before giving way to a dusting of sweet spice, nuances of plum and white strawberries. It’s wonderfully pure, seeming almost weightless at times yet with gorgeous inner sweetness and a complex display of bright red fruits laced with minerals, hints of licorice and building florality. The long and classically structured finish guarantees that no matter how enjoyable this may be today, it will only get better. “Always traditional, but different hands, different wines.” This quote from Alessandro Mori stuck with me while tasting through the new releases of Il Marroneto. It was a comment Mori made as he expressed the respect that he has for many of his famous neighbors, all on the north side of the Montalcino hill. For Mori, a producer who is traditional in every way, his theory is to allow the vineyard to fully express itself from vintage to vintage, but that the imprint of the winemaker is paramount. In the case of Il Marroneto, this is a gentle and fully natural approach, but it is certainly not hands-off. Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Mori watched the entire way of thinking in Montalcino change to appeal to the consumers and wine writers of the time. While other producers sought to create wines of power with darker colors, riper fruit and a sheen of oak, he decided to go in a completely opposite direction. This was how the Il Marroneto Madonna delle Grazie came into being. It’s a wine that unapologetically struts its Northern Montalcino terroir, produced from a selection made within its namesake vineyard, and through much slower processes within the winery. While Mori looks for the beauty of Sangiovese within his Brunello, his Madonna delle Grazie is about its complexity. It’s funny to think that when it was first produced, Madonna delle Grazie wasn’t met with high acclaim; yet today, it’s one of the top wines vintage after vintage - as it is again in 2016. The good news is that you don’t need to buy up to the Madonna delle Grazie to understand the spellbinding and whimsical styles of this house because the Brunello di Montalcino alone is a wine that communicates its importance and longevity but also a purity of fruit and sheer drinkability, which is enthralling.

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