Brunello Di Montalcino, 2006
Cedar spice and salt-infused notes coupled with basket loads of sweet fruit. Juicy ripe summer berry and plum flavours, enticing and voluptuous with sufficient verve and freshness. Long and intensely spicy on the finish. Uccelliera consider 2010 one of the great vintages, one that combines the intensity of 2006 with the allure of 2007. A blend of vines with various exposures and soils centred on Castelnuovo del Abate on the south-east side of Montalcino. This is a warm part of Montalcino but the estate’s high vineyard range, from 150 to 350 metres above sea level, cool fermentations and use of large casks as well as small barriques, help to make this generous, ripe but supremely moreish and refined. The wine undergoes both fermentations in steel tank, followed by ageing for 36 months in a mixture of large slavonian oak cask and smaller French barriques, with an additional eight months finishing in bottle.
critic reviews
The 2006 Brunello di Montalcino opens with an enticing whiff of lavender and black tea leaves, hints of violet pastilles and crushed blackberries. This is wildly fresh, with stunning acidity and bright red berry fruits, displaying an almost impossible liveliness for its age. It finishes crunchy and long, with a licorice and tart blackberry tinge, as the slightest tug of residual tannins lingers under an air of blue and purple inner florals. What an absolute beauty this is and it is still slowly maturing in bottle.