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Tasting notes
This is a gorgeous wine – offering immediacy and exoticism. The nose is expressive with incense, cigar-box, perfume, cedar and sweet, dark spice aromas that waft from the glass. The palate follows with a rich velveteen flow of intense and opulent fruit – concentrated dark berries with a bright, crunchy freshness to it. Despite the initial openness, there’s focus here, the wine tightening up with its tight core of fruit, revealing its potential on a long, smoky and savoury finish. It’s amazingly drinkable now, but will only offer more over the next decade or two.
Critic scores
Monica Larner, Wine Advocate
More reviews and scores
The Tenuta San Guido 2020 Bolgheri Sassicaia speaks to those who seek a more voluptuous, opulent and, ultimately, more accessible wine. This vintage is a precise reflection of Coastal Tuscany, as opposed to a more generic "Tuscan" wine from elsewhere in this large central Italian region. You taste the ripeness and soft fruit weight that comes from a coastal appellation with especially bright luminosity and warm Mediterranean offshore breezes. Sassicaia from the cool vintages is a famously reticent or withholding wine in its earliest years, requiring a long lead time before it eases into an ideal drinking window. That's definitely not the case here. This wine is beautiful and compelling straight out of the gate, showing a lovely mix of dark fruit, oak spice, balanced freshness, textural richness, soft tannins and an expertly contained 14% alcohol content. The wine's immediate character is what distinguishes this vintage, and I wouldn't get too fussed by exaggerated cellar-aging ambitions. The wine awards sheer pleasure in its current form, with dazzling primary fruit and soaring intensity over the near and medium term.
About the producer
Tentuta San Guido produces Sassicaia – Italy’s most famous wine. An icon from the Bolgheri coastline of Tuscany, made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, its rise to prominence in the late 1970s sparked the Super Tuscan revolution.