Castel Giocondo Brunello 2007 & Wine Tour

Hello everybody! Been a while hasn't it? Well I'm back to blogging now that I've finished my summer classes and Chrono Trigger (which is an amazing SNES game with a gorgeous soundtrack, you should definitely check it out if you're into that sort of stuff.)

440 meters above sea level, the highest vines
of the Castel Giocondo winery are found.

Now get this, for the past week I've been wine tasting with my cousin in Italy. We saw three wineries in total, two in Tuscany and one in Campania on the Amalfi Coast. I'll be reviewing the wineries one by one for the next couple of posts, and I have a ton of pictures to go along with them! I'm going to start with the first one I went to, the Castel Giocondo winery in Montalcino where I had the extreme pleasure to try the not yet released 2007 vintage of the Castel Giocondo Brunello and the groundbreaking first Super Tuscan produced in Montalcino, Luce 2008 (production began in 1993, but you know what I mean.)

Here's where the barrique are stored, and as
you can tell, this is the fancy part of the cellar.

So the winery is situated in Montalcino, which about three hours by car outside of Florence. Montalcino is essentially a tiny town in southern Tuscany that is found on top of a mountain that is covered in sangiovese grosso vines. As you can see, it's damn beautiful up there.

At the winery I got to see the original cellar and the newly added cellar that the winery opened for the purposes of tours (opened in 2005, if I remember correctly.) You can see the sharp contrast in the appearance of where the production started as a large square room with tons of equipment and where the winery becomes a bit of a souped-up, fancy cellar.

After seeing the cellar and the vines, we were taken to an actual castle at the highest part of the winery to taste a few wines and have some classy Italian finger foods to go along with them. We were given, as I stated before, the Castel Giocondo Brunello 2007 and the Luce 2008. Both pretty phenomenal and luxurious wines.

Excuse the photo quality here, I'm still getting
used to my new iPhone...

The Brunello is set to be released internationally in January, so it technically isn't entirely ready to be drunk yet. Typically a Brunello, being of the DOCG denomination of Italian winemaking rules, requires at least four years before being released commercially. However, being a Brunello (and a great one at that,) the wine was still very drinkable this young. Too many people reserve Brunello for the future, claiming that they need at least eight years after being vintaged to be drunk properly. While I respect the aging potential of the sangiovese grosso grape, I also respect the awesome fruit that a young Brunello packs.

The entrance to the winery after about a mile
drive through the winery's vineyards.

The Brunello was fruity and featured a deeply creamy vanilla aroma. It also represented itself beautifully in the glass, then again when you're tasting wine in a castle I think just about everything around you is beautiful. The flavor and nose were a bit closed, and I attribute that to the wine not being fully developed in the bottle yet. I would order a case of the stuff but I wouldn't open any of it until 2013 at the very earliest. I shouldn't knock it too much though, because this wine still exhibited some complex aromas (including what appeared to be chalk and wild berries) that I couldn't fully appreciate due to the entire experience of the wine tour. In my defense, it was my first wine tour and I made it a point to focus more on the wine I was tasting than my surroundings for the next ones.

I would include the Luce 2008 in this post as well, but I appeared to have rambled on for quite a bit and I don't want to make this any lengthier than it is already. Next time, I'll write about the Castellare di Castellina winery in Chianti Classico, found right outside Sienna. If you'd like for me to write about the Luce as well, please don't hesitate to email me at mfilippobruno at gmail.com. At any rate fellas, thanks for reading, and you'll hear from me soon!