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| The Environmental Mosaic |
And then there comes a class that sets things right again. Such was the occasion last week in Dallas when Gabriele Goretti presented before a receptive crowd his vision of the 2021 vintage for Brunello di Montalcino.
An offshoot of Benvenuto Brunello that the Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino has initiated, this is an elaboration of the Brunello Forma Series, where designated experts in the field dive deeper into what makes quality Brunello. I found it fascinating, as this subject has been rolling around in my head for years — questions of location, altitude, soil, geological formation, and of course the size of the winery and its production capabilities. Thankfully, younger souls have taken on the task and made great leaps forward in communicating just why and how Brunello aspires to greatness in the world of wine.
My first wine trip to Montalcino was in 1984 (the year Italy's first Master of Wine was born), and to say the place was a sleepy little hamlet would be an understatement. But even in those early days, one could sense the underpinnings of potential for greatness. It was an opportune moment for wealthy industrialists and merchants from Milan and further afield to invest in raw real estate in and around the town. There were, of course, vineyards and wineries already producing, but the "aha" moment was yet to arrive.
The "aha" moment for Brunello wasn't a single flash — it was a sequence of them, each one building on the last, stretching across decades. And there's an irony at the heart of the whole ascent that gets lost in the reverence we now accord the wine. It begins, as these things often do, with a moment in a cellar — 1970, John Mariani, a young Italian-American importer from New York, standing in the dim cool of Il Greppo while Franco Biondi-Santi poured the 1961 and the 1964. The wine said everything it needed to say. The problem was that almost no one in America could hear it yet. What followed was one of the more unlikely financing arrangements in the history of fine wine: Riunite Lambrusco — sweet, fizzy, marketed to Americans who kept it in the refrigerator next to the beer — quietly paid for the grandest Italian wine investment of the 20th century. The Marianis came back to Montalcino in 1978 with bulldozers and a vision that unsettled the locals, bought 7,000 acres, restored a medieval castle, and planted Sangiovese at a scale the valley had never imagined. DOCG arrived in 1980, the first in Italy, and gave the world a bureaucratic confirmation of what Montalcino had always understood about itself. The American market absorbed it, amplified it, and eventually crowned it. A wine that had lived quietly in the memory of a few Tuscan families now stood alongside Bordeaux and Burgundy — carried there, in no small part, by the same people who once sold Riunite on ice.
I was watching all of this happen in real time. My first introduction to Brunello came when I was a server at a high-tone Italian restaurant in Dallas in the late 1970s. One of the wine distributor managers would dine there frequently — Pinky Parrish — and he would invite me to tastings, knowing I was a young man interested in that kind of thing. I distinctly remember tasting the 1955 Biondi-Santi Riserva in 1980 and thinking that everything I had experienced about Italian wine on my two previous trips to Italy in no way prepared me for the unlimited potential Italian wine would have in its — and my — future. It was an epiphany.
In 1980 I also joined a restaurant group to manage a wine bar, and one of the wines on our list was the 1971 Brunello Poggio alle Mura — for a whopping $22 a bottle — then owned by Giovanni Mastropaolo, an Italian entrepreneur who had built a fortune in Venezuela. Imported and distributed by Villa Banfi at the time, it would later be folded into the Castello Banfi holdings. Already then, Banfi was moving things forward.
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In September 1983, Wine Spectator's Marvin Shanken himself wrote a piece called "Brunello is Colombini's Love," in which Fattoria dei Barbi owner Francesca Colombini Cinelli stated that her dream was to bring Brunello to the very top level of world wine quality. The Wine Spectator pushed hard on this idea, and the world was catching on. Yes, Banfi was a big story. But there was also a myriad of other stories, just as significant in stature if not in scale.
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In 1985, Italian Wine & Spirits magazine — Civiltà del Bere — devoted a major portion of its Oct–Dec issue to "Regal Brunello," commencing with a treatise by Franco Biondi-Santi. Complete with maps and photos of the different vineyards, shoots, leaves, and clusters of the Sangiovese biotypes typical at the time in Montalcino, it was heady reading for a young man just beginning his career in the wine trade. So much so that I had already made my way to Montalcino in 1984 — to Barbi, among others — to witness, taste, and record my impressions. I had my camera, of course.
The fuse had been lit in several spots. The 1980s were the beginning of a fast and furious ascent for Montalcino and Brunello. All of which is to say: now the first Italian Master of Wine, from Montalcino of all places, makes his way to Texas and Florida and — with the aid of all the technological advances made in the vineyard and in the classroom — puts on one of the best master classes I have attended in years. He was well prepared, concise, and didn't waste time with superfluous commentary. He got right to it. Ah, youth.
Next week: what Gabriele Goretti actually covered in Dallas.
