A new model for evaluating vintages is starting in Montalcino. From this year, in fact, the vintage presented at Benvenuto Brunello will no longer be the harvest just concluded but the one that will be released on the market next January, 2020. For the first time, a Consortium is launching a multi-phase project (meteorological, analytical, sensorial) that culminates with an international panel of 8 Masters of Wine (MW). The goal is to highlight the stylistic and distinctive personality of Tuscany’s flagship wine. After the reopening of the format to producers in attendance, this is the further great novelty of the Brunello di Montalcino Wine Consortium for the 33rd edition of the event which, from 14 to 18 November, will christen the 2020 vintage and the 2019 Riserva.
The working group of the new project, led by the board of directors of the consortium and made up of expert climatologists, specialists in territorial analysis and international tasters, has created an innovative evaluation method that takes into account the factors of great heterogeneity and identity that characterize the denomination. The system designed combines objective data linked to the climatic trends of the different vintages, the consequences that the seasons have on the vegetative-productive behavior of the Sangiovese variety and the subjective sensations of a representative sample of tasters to perceive and enhance the peculiarities of the different vintages.
“After abandoning the judgment expressed by the number of stars for the November preview of Benvenuto Brunello in 2021, it was necessary to define a new paradigm for analyzing the vintage that is no longer merely quantitative but based on objective, authoritative and non-self-referential data”, explains the president of the Consortium, Fabrizio Bindocci. “For the first time, a protection Consortium also entrusts the evaluation of its flagship wine to an external team of experts, who can change at each edition. An innovation that will allow Montalcino producers to present themselves on the market on the basis of a solid and contemporary evaluation model, which takes into account climate change, the current style and consumption trends of Brunello”.
For this project, the Consortium relied on the Italian MWs, Gabriele Gorelli and Andrea Lonardi and Copernico, a leading company in the field of high tech farming. “This model, built and developed for Montalcino, represents a tool to better trace in a contemporary way the high quality, the continuous stylistic renewal of the denomination as well as the challenges and effects generated by climate change”, commented the MWs Gabriele Gorelli and Andrea Lonardi. “A method that also allows the territory and companies to communicate in an identity-based way”.
On October 15, at the headquarters of the organization, Gorelli and Lonardi led the first blind tasting panel of the samples of Brunello 2020, already bottled and ready to enter the market in January. For this debut, the MWs were selected: Madeleine Stenwreth (Sweden), Justin Knock (UK), Michelle Cherutti-Kowal (UK), Tracey Dobbin (France), Frank Roeder (Germany) and Philip Goodband (USA). The Consortium’s presidency committee was also present at the blind tasting.
