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Le Macioche, Brunello di Montalcino

Tuscany, Italy 2008 (750mL)
Regular price$75.00
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Le Macioche, Brunello di Montalcino

The most important takeaway from today’s offer is that you can put your hands on a perfectly aged Brunello di Montalcino, a wine that is singing right now, and enjoy it now for well under three figures. Not much more needs to be said, really, but I’ll add a geeky detail: This wine exposes the flaws of vintage reports.


Go back and look at what some critics had to say about 2008 in Montalcino, and you might not have been too keen to pick up wines described as “austere.” But what do you know, here we are more than 10 years later and today’s ’08 from Le Macioche is glorious. Might it have been “austere” when it was first released? Who knows, and frankly, who cares. (And besides, shouldn’t we expect a just-released wine from Montalcino to be at least a little austere?) As I said when we offered the 2007 edition of this Brunello, Le Macioche is Montalcino Sangiovese done right: aromatic, energetic, focused, structured…the whole package. In an era of increasingly rich, even syrupy styles of Brunello in some vintages, Le Macioche is a fantastic example of how a wine can be “modern”—which is to say clean and polished—without being hugely extracted and over-oaked. The Sangiovese grape’s proportions are meant to be moderate, not massive; there should be aromatic lift and nerve. This wine has that. It’s a blue-chip Italian collectible, entering its peak right now and unbelievably well-priced.


My first visit to the tiny Le Macioche property was about 10 years ago, when it was owned by Matilde Zecca and Achille Mazzocchi. The legendary Tuscan enologist Maurizio Castelli—one of the greats at coaxing elegance and perfume from the Sangiovese grape—was the estate’s consultant. Covering only about six hectares (with three hectares of vines classified for Brunello production), the estate has changed hands twice in the intervening years; most recently, it was purchased by brothers Riccardo and Renzo Cotarella, the former a famous Italian “flying winemaker” and the latter the longtime technical director at the sprawling Marchese Antinori wine firm. Together with their daughters, they took over Le Macioche in 2017 and they chose very wisely: situated at about 450 meters’ elevation, the vineyards here face mostly southeast and are rooted in galestro—the schistous, limestone marl found in Montalcino’s best sites. The property is just down the road from the iconic Biondi-Santi winery.


It’s too early to tell which direction the Cotarellas will take Le Macioche, but this 2008 was crafted in a traditional style, undergoing a lengthy maceration on its skins during the initial fermentation and aged in 30-hectoliter Slavonian oak casks for 44 months. It then rested in bottle a minimum of six months before release.


Going back to my little rant about vintage reports and rankings for second, I want to mention how my experience with the ’07/’08 Le Macioche Brunellos reminded me of the countless ’97/’98 comparisons I found myself making all the time a decade ago. As most Italian wine lovers know, 1997 was a critically beloved vintage, known for powerful, ripe wines that were enormously appealing in their youth; by contrast, ’98 was a little cooler, the wines a little leaner, and therefore less talked-about. By the early- to mid-2000s, when I was blessed to serve these wines in large quantities, I became increasingly convinced that the ’98s were as good or better than the ’97s—more perfumed, more well-preserved. Yes, the best ’97s were amazing, but plenty felt a little tired by their 10th birthday.


We tasted an assortment of Le Macioche library releases (including re-visiting the ’07, which I’d advise you to drink now, despite my previous “hold” recommendation), and the ’08 was the clear winner. It is showing off the full range of mature “secondary” aromas, and I’d say it should be drunk now and over the next few years, but there’s still lots of energy and depth of fruit. Put another way, it’s right in its sweet spot. In the glass, it displays a garnet-black core moving to brick orange at the rim, with aromas of black cherry, plum, red and black currant, orange peel, tar, leather, baking spices, and lots of woodsy underbrush. Nearly full-bodied but blessed with great balancing acidity, the wine’s tannins have softened but it remains refreshing rather than syrupy. Decant it about 30 minutes before service in large Bordeaux stems at 60-65 degrees. This wine was made for pretty much any beef preparation you want to throw at it, but, as with the ’07, I’m suggesting a leaner cut so as not to overwhelm its velvety refinement. Talk about instant gratification—this is it!

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Italy

Northwestern Italy

Piedmont

Italy’s Piedmont region is really a wine “nation”unto itself, producing world-class renditions of every type of wine imaginable: red, white, sparkling, sweet...you name it! However, many wine lovers fixate on the region’s most famous appellations—Barolo and Barbaresco—and the inimitable native red that powers these wines:Nebbiolo.

Tuscany

Chianti

The area known as “Chianti” covers a major chunk of Central Tuscany, from Pisa to Florence to Siena to Arezzo—and beyond. Any wine with “Chianti” in its name is going to contain somewhere between 70% to 100% Sangiovese, and there are eight geographically specific sub-regions under the broader Chianti umbrella.

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