2018 Rosso di Montalcino
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Tasting notes
The 2018 Rosso di Montalcino captivates with its wild floral perfumes, balsam herbal tones and vivid black cherry fruit. This is pure and lifted, but almost fleeting in feel, revealing its saline minerals up front before giving way to notes of young strawberry and inner rose. Only a hint of fine tannin remains, as a pleasant flourish of inner sweetness tapers off to nuances of pomegranate. The 2018 is ready to please today, and probably has another three to possibly five years of pleasurable drinking in front of it.
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Average Score
Monica Larner, Wine Advocate
Eric Guido, Vinous
More reviews and scores
The bouquet is rich, displaying foresty wild berry, sweet herbal tones, and spices, along with hints of earth and undergrowth. On the palate, silky textures give way to red berries with a savory mix of herbs and spice, zesty acids and minerals. The finish is long on tart wild berry fruits, zippy acids, saturating spices and lasting mineral tones.
This is a terrific wine that is one big step above your standard Rosso and one tiny step below your standard Brunello. The Canalicchio di Sopra 2018 Rosso di Montalcino is a fresh and versatile wine. The 2018 vintage was cool and had more rainfall than average. Windy conditions dried and helped to concentrate the fruit right before harvest. This wine is made from a selection of the estate's youngest vines, with about 90% of the fruit coming from the Canalicchio area and 10% from Montosoli. I had a glass with a delicious plate of vegetarian lasagna. This wine moves across the palate with steely precision, breaking up any cheese, butter or olive oil flavors along the way. It offers a snappy, lean to medium-weight drinking style with lots of freshness and enough texture to withstand some near-term cellar aging. This Rosso was bottled in November 2019 and released in January 2020. Not counting large format bottles, some 40,800 regular-sized bottles were produced.