How New Vintages of Brunello di Montalcino Will Be Assessed

7 min read

Last month, the Consorzio del Vino di Brunello di Montalcino hosted their annual Benvenuto Brunello event in Montalcino, Tuscany. This annual gathering in the picturesque town in southern Tuscany offered media and the wine trade a chance to taste the newest vintages — which after the New Year rolls over will be the 2020 and, for riserva-level wines, the 2019. But it was also a time for the Consorzio to announce some major changes in how the quality and conditions of each vintage of Brunello di Montalcino will be evaluated officially.

The Changing Climate

Many of the world’s most esteemed appellations — Brunello di Montalcino included — evaluate their vintages and provide a score, rating or some top-level generalizations on quality and conditions, as a means to frame expectations for merchants and consumers.

While on the surface it might seem like a convenient way to drum up hype for a year’s worth of wine, this kind of intel — if backed by data as well as critical assessment — is proving to be even more valuable than before. Wild weather patterns caused by global climate change have not only kept producers on their toes, they’ve yielded unexpected wines at times.

In Tuscany, the overall trend has been hotter and drier conditions leading to increased alcohol levels and, sometimes, reduced yields. But it has been the rain, hail and frost periods in between — the when and how much of each event — that has really punctuated the vintage charts. In some places, we’ve gone from “no two vintages are alike” to “no two vintages are anywhere close to being alike.”

Adaptation has become the name of the game, and its not just viticulturists and enologists mending their methods on a constant basis — the Consorzio del Vino di Brunello di Montalcino is changing how it does some of its business as well.

How Vintages Were Assessed

No matter how you slice the stars, you shouldn’t overlook the context to back up such a rating.

For many years now, the Consorzio has announced a rating for the nascent vintage at Benvenuto Brunello. The system for devising this rating was based on one to five stars, and its aim was to assess the quality potential of each vintage. Wines had been judged by a group of outside experts in “an embryonic stage,” as Gabriele Gorelli MW called it on a conference call in early October with the media — within four months after harvest. While a lot can be identified at this early stage, it is not the clearest of crystal balls.

Furthermore, as so often happens with our beloved drink, the desire for simplicity and ease of understanding quickly ignored the beauty of nuance: a five-star vintage would command more attention, spark hype and consequently drive prices. However, does a five-star vintage mean conditions were most friendly (that is, least damaging) to producers? Or more conducive to higher point scores (therefore, more ripe)? Or best bought with collecting in mind? No matter how you slice the stars, you shouldn’t overlook the context to back up such a rating.

Meanwhile, an overshadowed three-star vintage, such as 2014, could still have incredible wines from certain producers, if they threaded the needle of vintage conditions just right. (Which many of them did, and continue to do so. Whether you are into Bordeaux, Burgundy, Barolo or Brunello, you know that the best producers earn their reputation in these crummy vintages).

The Pivot

The Consorzio may have understood these imperfections in the system fully, but the desire for change — a forced recalculation — occurred because of COVID-19. The 2020 vintage, which is about to debut, could not be judged the old way because of governmental restrictions imposed due to the pandemic. And besides, Benvenuto Brunello was cancelled that year, interrupting the assessment of the 2015 and 2016 vintages.

Word choice matters, and the wine trade runs on numbers. Will this work? We’re about to find out.

The time for change had come.

Starting with the 2024 Benvenuto Brunello event, the Consorzio is now shifting toward evaluating market-ready wines mere months before their release (versus embryonic wines that just completed fermentation). Given the sternness of the Brunello clone of Sangiovese in its youth, this will be a far better gauge of what to expect, even for the highly trained tasters making the evaluation.

Additionally, the Consorzio has ditched the star-rating system in favor of “something more qualitative and stylistic.” In essence, they have come up with a brief statement that captures the “personality and qualities of the vintage that would be useful to producers, stakeholders and consumers.”

As a “word nerd” who hates point scores, I applaud this development (I, too, have considered ditching my own star-based system). We need to celebrate the nuance of wine and use it as an invitation to new consumers, not a cudgel of exclusionary elitism. Despite your best intentions, sometimes all people see is stars, and the context that gives it meaning is glossed over.

But I also know two things: word choice matters, and the wine trade runs on numbers. Will this work? We’re about to find out.

How Brunello Vintages Will Be Assessed

To get to those words, the Consorzio has given itself a tall order: compile reams of empirical data on weather and the chemical composition of wines, commission a tasting panel of eight Masters of Wine from around the world to make assessments, and then distill it all down into two to three words that describe it all in a way that is “international, not provincial” yet “specific to Sangiovese.”

In their presentation to the media, the Consorzio cited three examples of how this could work, which were only for demonstration purposes. That three-star 2014 vintage, they suggested, could have been “grace under pressure,” while the next two vintages (both five-star) could have been “power and purity” and “finesse and depth.”

At Benvenuto Brunello, they followed all of this up by announcing that 2020 was “captivating, bright and succulent.”

I commend them for taking a swing at the fences on this. Behind the scenes, I spend my days constantly re-evaluating the language of wine and how I should best utilize it, break it, reform it and present it to you all. So does my friend and colleague, Meg Maker of Terroir Review, who has made it her personal mission to research the evolution of wine speak over the years. We both know how challenging it can be to arrive at the right words within one language, English. Arriving at a statement that will also easily translate into several different languages? Indeed, this should be an interesting experiment.

But we’re not the primary audience for this shift: that would be the wine industry and those in charge of selling the final product.

“Having a qualitative approach with weather data is so important,” my colleague and collaborator — sommelier Scott Thomas, who attended Benvenuto Brunello — told me. “Combining that with critical judgment from such an esteemed panel … that alone is a major step in the right direction.”

He went on to point out that the 2024 harvest stretched over 40 days this year, yet another anomaly that will undoubtedly have an impact on vintage character.

But, he cautioned, this will take some getting used to by the wine trade, which can be slow to adjust to new approaches. “Will this new method of appraisal move the needle as much as stars? I don’t know. Will it influence the trade or those with the most influence? And do consumers care that much? In the end, this is about the outcome of sales, so it all remains to be seen.”

We also have to take any proclamation on vintage character in stride. It is never meant to be gospel. After all, the Brunello di Montalcino appellation is fairly diverse in terms of geography, climate and biodiversity. Given the localized impacts of severe weather events, the varying techniques employed by producers of varying size and means, and the potential for these wines to shift into other spectrums of flavor well after release … well, broad stroke declarations can only get us so far.

Yet it is increasingly the job of consortiums to provide clear-eyed information to consumers on how the climate is impacting their product. And with the famously complex and nuanced Brunello di Montalcino, those assessing the vintage are at least working with a polyglot wine. We’ll see what else they come up with, and whether the wine trade finds it useful.