Salvioni: Brunello di Montalcino 1985-2011

Several years in the making, this truly once in a lifetime vertical traced the arc of Giulio Salvioni’s Brunello di Montalcino back to the inaugural 1985 vintage. From the outset, Salvioni’s Brunellos attracted a great deal of acclaim, and with good reason. The early vintages remain monuments to the potential of Sangiovese in Montalcino, while many of the more recent vintages are contemporary masterpieces.

For the occasion, the Salvioni family gathered a few of their longtime confidants including winemaker Attilio Pagli, who was a recent graduate of Siena’s Agrarian Institute working under the guidance of celebrated master taster Giulio Gambelli when he started consulting to the Salvioni family. “Towards the end of 1984, the Salvionis brought me a sample of their homemade wine and asked me to do some basic lab analysis. I tasted the wine and I thought it was fantastic!” says Pagli. “Remember, 1984 was a horrible year in Tuscany. That is when I understood the potential of this land. From there, I said ‘Why don’t we make a Brunello here?’” Pagli collaborated with Gambelli from 1982 through 1995. “The first Brunellos I worked on were Gianfranco Soldera’s 1983s. That time spent with Gambelli was a great gift.”

A few members of the local press were also in attendance, including Andrea Gabbrielli, who is credited as the first Italian critic to recognize the quality of Salvioni Brunello after he gave the 1985 the coveted Tre Bicchieri award at Gambero Rosso. I sat in the corner and tried to soak in as much as possible (information, not wine!) All of the bottles were sourced from the Salvionis’ personal cellar.

The Salvioni family and their wines embody the essence of what makes artisan Brunello so special. Totally hand made, from the vineyard to the cellar and into the bottle, these wines have much more in common with the great reds of Piedmont and Burgundy than they do with the vast majority of what comes out of Montalcino these days. Up until a few years ago, labeling was still done by hand because the cellar was not equipped with power outlets that could handle modern equipment. Production is miniscule, which means bottles disappear from the market as quickly as they arrive.

The Salvioni vineyard, Montalcino 

Salvioni’s La Cerbaiola property sits in a well-exposed, elevated plateau at about 430 meters above sea level that gets sun most of the day in what is one of the most celebrated stretches of land in all of Montalcino. Cerbaiona lies just beyond. The soils are composed of several variants of the local galestro. A soil study that is under way at present has begun to reveal far more complexity than was once commonly believed to exist. “Diego Molinari at Cerbaiona was one of my early influences,” says Giulio Salvioni. “He would pass by every day and tease me – ‘are you going to leave me here alone to make wine by myself?’ he would say. Eventually, I decided to take the plunge.”

The early Salvioni Brunellos were made from the central part of the original vineyard, which measures about 2.5 hectares, all located around the main winery building. At the time, the land was planted mostly with olive trees and just a few vineyards. The first Salvioni wines were made with vines planted in the early 1980s. A devastating frost hit Tuscany in 1985, taking with it a large number of very old olive trees. As a result, the Salvionis redeveloped their estate with more vineyards starting around 1987. In 2001, the Salvionis added a little more than a hectare of vineyards when new planting permits were granted across the region. Today, the total surface area of vineyards is just under four hectares.

In most vintages Salvioni produces four casks of Brunello, which account for 12-13,000 bottles. When quality is variable, one or more of those casks is bottled early and sold as Rosso, as was the case in 2009 and, more recently, 2011, when half of the production was declassified. In exceptional cases, such as 2014, an entire vintage can be declassified to Rosso. Much more commonly, in top vintages there is no Rosso at all, as will be the case for both 2012 and 2013, where all of the wine will be bottled as Brunello. Even today, the wines in cask are divided between two tiny, cramped cellars, one in the center of town and the other next to the vineyards.