The Other Sangiovese

When California wine producers got tired of imitating Bordeaux, some decided to try their hands at classic Italian wine grapes. Naturally, they gravitated toward the Sangiovese wines of Tuscany.

The question: Did they get the right Sangiovese?

The general impulse was right. Tuscany is the shining heart of Italian wine. There are lots of excellent wine regions in Italy (the entire country is kind of one big vineyard), and each has its own bottled personality.

Several are more closely examined by connoisseurs than Tuscany. Piemonte, for example, produces the great Barolos that by most accounts rank first among Italian reds for complexity and long aging. Yet no region can match the sunny, easy drinking wines of Tuscany for sheer crowd appeal.

Every good wine maven knows that Tuscany’s poster wine, Chianti, is made primarily from the grape called Sangiovese and that the red wine from the smaller Montalcino district just south of Chianti is made from the grape called Brunello. Often, however, not even the most assiduously boring wine snob is aware that Brunello is really a type of Sangiovese.

They call it Sangiovese Grosso, but a Sangiovese by any other name would be as lip-smackin’ good. A fairly accurate translation of Sangiovese is the blood of Jove, the chief god of ancient Rome. (The Italians are no strangers to hyperbole when it comes to wine. What other country has a sweet white wine called Lachrymae Christi--”Tears of Christ”--or a wine district formally named Est! Est! Est!--”It is [good]! It is. It is!”?

Not coincidentally, Tuscan reds are among the most California-like of all European wines. As in California’s coastal valleys, the climate of the mountainous wine country just inland from the Maremma coast is warm and dry, but the heat is tempered by the sea. The melange of marine and volcanic soils is also a lot like California’s.

So it’s not surprising that Sangiovese has become one of the hottest new-wave grape varieties here in the Golden State. What is a little ironic is that the Californians have focused on the Sangiovese of Chianti rather than on Brunello.

The Brunello district, surrounding the hill town of Montalcino south of Siena, is even more like California than the much larger Chianti region to the north, between Siena and Florence. It is warmer and drier, and the offshoot of Sangiovese that has evolved there makes the most of those conditions to yield wines that are typically more profound and long-lived than the more exuberant, earlier-maturing Chiantis.

The climate owes much to a high-pressure cell that persists throughout the summer in the region of Mt. Amiata, the region’s tallest peak. The wooded slopes of Mt. Amiata provide much of the world’s meager supply of white truffles, along with the Tuscan cook’s beloved wild boar. They are also honeycombed with the temples and tombs of ancient Etruscans, who cultivated wine grapes in the region thousands of years ago.

In recent centuries the area was known for its noble version of Moscadello (or Muscat), a sweet white grape. The Sangiovese grape has been grown seriously in the Montalcino district for only 150 years or so, the blink of an eye in the arc of wine’s history. Brunello di Montalcino came to the greater wine world’s attention in 1969, when a 1955 Biondi-Santi Brunello was served to Queen Elizabeth in Rome.

Not long after that, some of the region’s more progressive producers concluded that the Brunello vineyards could be greatly improved by clonal selection. For about two decades they have been intensively evaluating and selecting individual clones to upgrade their vineyards. The fruits of that campaign are just beginning to show up in neoclassical Brunello di Montalcino wines that reflect the process in new dimensions of body, aroma and flavor.

This process of refinement in the vineyards of Montalcino mirrors the Chianti 2000 project, which began about the same time in the larger and hitherto more famous Sangiovese region to the north of Montalcino. In a real sense, both regions have reinvented their vineyards, and that has affected their winemaking and led to a more international, fruit-driven style of wine. The evolution will be seen increasingly in wines from the mid-’90s onward.

The Brunello camp has been attacking the upgrade challenge from a slightly different direction than Chianti. There, the goal has been getting more concentration, body and depth out of the grape, buffing it out to produce more muscular, substantial wines.

The Brunellists already have plenty of substance, to the point that a typical Brunello di Montalcino of the past required a few years in bottle just to become approachable. Thus, growers have been encouraging their grape’s kinder, gentler qualities.

They’re looking for softer tannins, heightened aromas and an ever-greater richness of the Sangiovese Grosso’s celebrated spectrum of dark, earthy flavors, working from tannin toward juiciness, perhaps even balancing the Brunello power with some of that succulent cherry-candy character more typical of Chianti.

The charge has been led by the Banfi estate, a sprawling domain of vineyards and olive groves surrounding the medieval Castello Banfi just south of Montalcino. Banfi produces a wide range of wines, including so-called Super Tuscans, which are blends of Sangiovese and international varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah. But the soul of the estate is its Brunello di Montalcino, and its owners, American wine importers John and Harry Mariani, have spared no expense in attempting to produce the finest possible Brunello.

That has happened literally from the ground up. Under the direction of general manager Ezio Rivella, one of Italy’s most respected wine men, Banfi has conducted a long-range program of selection and assessment in its vineyards, gradually condensing more than 180 selections into about half a dozen of the most desirable clones. The chosen few have been used to replant vineyards throughout the vast Banfi property.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. First, beginning in the late 1970s, every vine in every vineyard block was examined and categorized. Throughout the ‘80s, grapes from similar vines were micro-vinified into tiny batches of wine for evaluation of vintage after vintage.

Meanwhile, the most promising selections were propagated and planted in blocks around the estate, with the same selections installed in different locations to see how they matched various soils and microclimates, a kind of sensory geographical focusing called zonation.

A range of experimental rootstocks made the equation even more complex. And all the while, the tiny lots of wine produced by various selections in different locations were being continuously analyzed and compared on qualities such as berry size, tannin quality, acidity, color and, of course, aroma and flavor.

When the vineyard dust began to clear a few years ago, a kind of clonal dream team emerged. Whether they really are the best and the brightest clones of the entire Montalcino district is open to question, but they certainly are the essence of its largest estate.

Considering that it takes three years for a newly planted vine to yield wine, the scope of the project seems gargantuan. Was it worth the effort? Perhaps the most significant aspect from a historical viewpoint is that several of the selections have been officially recognized as “Banfi clones” of Brunello, which will eventually be available to growers everywhere. The more immediate rewards, of course, are resting in large oak puncheons deep in Banfi’s vaulted brick cellars.

In tasting these neoclassical Brunellos recently, I was astonished by their seamless combination of power, structure and approachability. Clearly meant to age, they are also remarkably delicious at a stage at which traditional Brunellos are rather leathery and tough. Not to beat around the vine: They seemed rather Californian.

In fact, this new, improved Brunello may be just what California needs. Memo to Golden State wine producers: If you haven’t planted your Cal-Ital vineyard yet, you might want to visit Montalcino before choosing your clones.