Brunello Producers to Visit

I’ll be spending a week in Tuscany in early May. It’s not my trip, but I’ve been tasked with planning one day of winery visits/tastings in/around Montalcino.

So I wanted to solicit the board to see which Brunello producers would be your top 4 MUST visit? We’re a group of 10, all family, we drink a lot of traditionally made Italian wine. I’m just not sure the traditional Brunello producers would make for the best visits. I think we’ll have time for 3-4 visits (but please tell me if you suggest fewer) and we’ll certainly want to have lunch somewhere - perhaps restaurant at Poggio Antico or are there other great options in the area?

Also, we’ll actually be staying just outside of Montepulciano and I’d love recommendations for a winery or few in that area that perhaps we can bike to (on a different day). I know very very little about Montepulciano producers. And of course if there are any don’t miss restaurants around there, would love those recommendations as well.

Many thanks for the help!

Poggio Antico for lunch is very good, but make sure they’ll be open that day. Otherwise walk into town, look at the blackboards to find something appetizing and then ignore that and have the house red with whatever pasta is paired with the wild hare (lepre) sauce. You won’t be disappointed.

A visit to Riccardo Campinotti’s Le Ragnaie is always a treat. And we recently had a 2010 Rosso di Montalcino from our old friends at Caparzo that was really good. Too many good houses in Montalcino to list – my fingers would fall off.

Banfi would probably be educational – in a Napa Valley sort of way – if your group hasn’t been to a winery before.

For restaurants, La grotta in Montepulciano is an excellent choice.

For visits, i can recommend Barbi as they have their nice historic cellars and a good spot for lunch too. I am not such a fan of the wines though. We enjoyed visits to Ciacci Piccolomini and Poggio di Sotto and would recommend both. Banfi’s property is huge and the castle is impressive, even if you dont care for the style of the wine, we did enjoy seeing the place

Last time I was there I visited Soldera, Ragnaie, Colleoni (Sante Maria) and Molinari (Cerbaiona).

In terms of restaurants, Il Leccio (just outside of Montalcino) is a perennial favourite…

I agree with Tom and Mattias and I would say that given my past experience you are being very optimistic planning 3-4 visits in one day while schlepping 10 people around. Your lunch alone will probably take 2-3 hours. Factor in the time it takes to move around and it adds up. Are you planning on filling this day like 9-6 with wine tastings?

Yeah, I think 2 or 3 is likely best given the liquid lunch we’ll have. Although 2 sounds too few, so 3 is about right, especially if two of them are close to one another (or one of them is close to lunch).

We’re a group that’s very experienced with and love wine and food. And we drink mostly Italian wines (patriarch is Italian). And we favor visiting places that we can visit with the winemaker (or owner) whilst sipping rather than the napa tasting room style. After all it’s Italy!

Yes, the restaurant is wonderful – or was when we stayed there in 1998.

Can you tell me more about what you are looking for? Smaller places with more intimate meetings, or bigger places with more of a tour or walk-in type of vibe?

The best visit + winery combinations I’ve had in Montalcino were Uccelliera, Lisini and Fuligni, in that order. Superb producers, on great rocky sites closer to town. But nothing flashy or fancy at all.

Poggio Antico was quite different. A very large, sleek, modern, Napa-ish tasting room. On lesser terroir, I think, getting into the gently rolling hills farther from town, but they make very pretty wines in a more modernish style but not excessively so. It was nice, but like I said, nice in a Napa type way. The restaurant was closed the day were there, but they referred us to Bocon Divino just outside of Montalcino, which was excellent, had a spectacular view from the patio, and served all the Poggio Antico wines (including the Riserva) by the glass at very reasonable prices. (The restaurants around Montalcino are superb, particularly the more rustic ones.)

Banfi really doesn’t do it for me, and I’m not one of those snobby Europhile types, but the place seems very Disneyland, the restaurant, while fancy and splashy, wasn’t as good as the better modestly priced ones in the area, I thought. I also think the wines are fine but not especially good, and you’ll see why if you go there – their vineyards are on the expanses of flat farmland on the periphery of the too-large DOCG, really nothing like the rocky, dry vineyard land closer to town. The lesser terroir and grapes are compensated to some degree by more oak and so forth, but they really lack the purity and focus of the wines from good terroir.

Ciacci Piccolomini is a good winery, in the good terroir (located fairly near Lisini and Uccelliera, I think). The visit was more impersonal, but fine.

Casanova de Neri is a controversial producer. They do have vineyards in great terroir, but their upper tier wines are pretty heavily oaked. They are much better than the large commercial producers in the flatlands like Banfi and Frescobaldi, but they are big and modern (except for the regular/base Brunello, which has less modern treatment) and need many years to integrate. You can do a short tasting-only visit there, or book a tour. I just did the tasting, and it was nice, plus something you could do as a short third tasting on a day.

I think you should book one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and that’s really what you can expect for the day, especially if you’re driving over from Montepulciano. Driving around that area is lovely, but much slower than it appears on a map.

A good plan for a day would be to pick two of the good producers near the city of Montalcino like Uccelliera, Lisini or Fuligni (or whatever other ones you learn about – I’m sure there are many other good ones), book one in the morning and one in the afternoon, eat lunch at one of the great restaurants in and around town, and maybe if you want to push it, either taste more in the Fortezza in Montalcino or make a shorter visit to somewhere like Casanova de Neri or Ciacci Piccolomini. That will make for an awesome and pretty full day.

Have a great trip.

Oh, and pick wineries and restaurants relatively nearer each other for a day’s itinerary – as I said, you can spend a lot of time driving around from one winery to a restaurant to another winery, even though it may not look it on a map.

Our Poggio di Sotto tasting was excellent, also Fuligni and Casanova de Neri.

Thank you all for the great ideas thus far - lots of good recommendations.

Am definitely more into artisanal and even organic producers.

Anyone ever been to Stella di Campalto, Costanti or Soldera? How would these compare to La Ragnaie, Fuligni, Biondi Santi & Poggio Di Sotto? I need to pick 2-3 from this shortlist.

Just to second what Chris said. If you do more than two in a day, you’ll very likely be in a rush. A hectic day in the Val d’Orcia just sounds so counterintuitive . You could do one in the north in the morning (Nello Baricci at Montosoli, for example - small, artisanal, ultra-traditional), have lunch in or just outside Montalcino itself, and then another visit in the southern sector that afternoon somewhere close to Sant’Angelo in Colle or Castelnuovo dell’Abate (plenty to choose from). Make sure to visit the Abbazia di Sant’Antimo before you move on, it’s worth it.

As I said, I visited Soldera (2 years ago, just before they had the major loss in the cellar). I can highly recommend a visit there. Monica gave us the tour, we had our young twins with us (not even 1 year old at the time). The wife and children could stay back in a cool place in the rose garden whilst we walked the vineyards and tasted all the wines in the cellar. It is a meticulously maintained vineyard and cellar, all set in amazing surroundings. It should really be on your list. Afterwards we spent circa 1 1/2 hours in the garden with Monica whilst we fed the kids. There was no rush or whatsoever.

Completely the opposite was Colleoni, a great producer btw. But his vineyard is, on purpose, not a meticulously maintained as Soldera’s. Marino Colleoni lets herbs etc grow wild and also his plants are allowed to have more leaves etc than for instance at Soldera. His philosophy is that if you cut back the entire plant, all the leaves etc, all the power will concentrate on / in the grapes and you get very concentrated wines. He is seeking for elegance and balance. I am not saying that his method is right or wrong, but surely his wines show those characteristics.

+1

Check the schedule and try to come during one of the chants. You’ll feel like you’re stepping back into an earlier century.

Nothing to add about the wineries on this thread, but I would highly recommend an hour in late afternoon for wandering around and through Montalcino itself. A gorgeous, authentic ancient Tuscan hill-town, you can walk across nearly all of it in an hour or so. If you’re feeling warm from your exertions, you can sample the Brunello gelato in the central piazza, a fascinating and unusual treat. Or if you’d like a gentler sweet, I’d recommend the pear gelato. Possibly best ice cream I’ve had in my life.

I have been to Stella di Campalto and would highly recommend her as well as Pian del Orino. Stella is very personable, her wines are excellent, and her small winery is quite hard to find and well off the beaten path. Get directions before you go because the Gps is worthless. She welcomed us despite bottling that day which was quite generous but made things hectic as people came and got her to ask her questions frequently. It was actually quite informative on our part to see the bottling but she was very apologetic about all the interruptions and gave us a free bottle (which I tried to reject but she wasn’t hearing any of it).

Pian del Orino was the best winery visit I have had. We spent about an hour with Caroline (one of the owners) and two hours with Jan (her husband and the wine maker). They walked us through their vineyards, discussed their biodynamic philosophy, and opened multiple bottles. They are amazing people who are so passionate about vineyard work and viticulture.

I would STRONGLY recommend you only schedule two visits a day. You never can predict how long a visit will last at the small producers such as the ones you are talking about. These are artisans who are often not only welcoming you into their wineries, but their homes as well and treat you as such. Depending on what the winemaker/owner had planned that day visits can last for hours and it would be quite rude to pick up and leave prematurely after they have welcomed you. In fact we didn’t even have time for lunch as planned before making our second and last visit of the day after Pian (which was fine because they fed us lots of snacks anyway). If you want to fit in more than two visits I would recommend making one morning visit at a small winery in the AM and two visits at the big wineries in the PM. Enjoy the trip! Tuscany is amazing!!

I have to totally agree with this. Stella is very passionate and welcoming. And Caroline is too. Most Italian winemakers I’ve met are the same way. If they “take you in” you’re all the way in. I wouldn’t plan more than 2 - and really soak it in. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen, you have more time to wonder Montalcino? IF you have extra time, you can always stop somewhere else. Near Castello Banfi is Mate. That would be worth a stop too. Great people.

Sounds like 2 is definitely the number the question is which two to pick!

I also love the town of Montalcino and last time I was there I did plenty of damage at La Forteza (we had a four month old with us so didn’t make it to any wineries).

Last question (besides any recommendations on restaurants or wineries in Montepulciano): how does one go about arranging these Montalcino visits?

I visited Costanti, it was an excellent visit.
Almost all producers have email, you can usually find it on their web site. I have found that they usually respond to email within a day or two.

Cheers!

Arif, I would just email them as far in advance as possible. You should be able to arrange it all that way. Calling is difficult, with the time change and the chance that you’ll get a non-English speaker answering the phone.

It will require a bit of shuffling around as you find out who is available to have you visit on which days, but it’s very doable.

Don’t wait until the last minute, though, because you won’t always get responses right away and all.

As far as the visits themselves, my recommendations are (1) show up on time, which means leaving early because driving around there is slow and sometimes it’s challenging finding these places (some are on dirt roads and far aflung), (2) be as courteous and show as much interest as possible, and (3) if you have to cancel, do so as far in advance as possible so as not to inconvenience them. That’s pretty much it. You probably know all that already, but I say it for the benefit of others reading the thread who haven’t visited wineries in Italy before.