Brunello di Montalcino: The Complete History of Tuscany’s Great Red

Brunello di Montalcino is one of the greatest red wines Italy has ever made — a powerful, age-worthy Sangiovese from a single hilltop town in southern Tuscany, and, bottle for bottle, among the country’s most expensive. Its story is unusually tidy: essentially one family invented it, one grape defines it, one town makes it, and one modern scandal nearly tore it apart. This is the full history of Brunello di Montalcino.

One grape, one town

Brunello comes from a single place: the steep, isolated hill town of Montalcino, rising above the Tuscan countryside south of Siena. What makes it different from Chianti, a little to the north, is climate. Montalcino sits in the rain shadow of the great extinct volcano of Monte Amiata, which shelters it and makes it noticeably warmer and drier than the rest of Tuscany. In that heat, the same Sangiovese grape ripens more fully and powerfully — and by law, Brunello must be made from Sangiovese alone. The result is a wine of far greater weight, depth and longevity than most of its Tuscan cousins: bigger, darker, and built to last for decades.¹

The family that invented it

Brunello is one of the few great wines with a clear inventor. In the mid-1800s a Montalcino landowner, Clemente Santi, began experimenting with making a serious, long-lived wine from pure Sangiovese — then unheard of in a region of field blends. His grandson, Ferruccio Biondi Santi, carried it further, selecting a particular superior strain of the grape he called Brunello and bottling it to age. The first true Brunello di Montalcino is dated to around 1888, and a handful of those nineteenth-century Biondi-Santi bottles — the 1888 and 1891 — became among the most legendary and long-lived wines ever made. For a century the Biondi-Santi family were the near-sole guardians of Brunello; Ferruccio’s grandson Franco Biondi Santi, who died in 2013, was revered as the wine’s living conscience.²

Brunello is one of the rare great wines you can trace to a single family, a single grape and a single year: the Biondi-Santi, Sangiovese, and 1888.

First among the DOCGs

Brunello’s prestige was recognised early. When Italy created its top guaranteed quality tier, the DOCG, in 1980, Brunello di Montalcino was among the very first wines to receive it — a mark of how far ahead of the field it already stood. Its rules are among the strictest in Italy: a Brunello may not be released until more than five years after the harvest, with at least two of those spent in oak, and a Riserva must wait six. Few wines anywhere are made to be aged so long before they are even sold.³

Rosso di Montalcino: the younger sibling

Because great Brunello demands so much patience and costs so much to make, the town created a nimbler companion. Introduced in 1984, Rosso di Montalcino is made from the same 100% Sangiovese in the same vineyards, but released far younger — fresher, fruitier, cheaper, and often drawn from the very same estates. It is one of Italy’s smartest buys: a genuine taste of Montalcino’s magic without the long wait or the high price.⁴

Brunellopoli: the scandal that tested it

Brunello’s golden run collided with crisis in 2008, in an affair the Italian press dubbed Brunellopoli — “Brunello-gate.” Prosecutors alleged that several producers had been quietly blending international grapes such as Merlot and Cabernet into their Brunello to make it darker and softer — a direct violation of the rule that Brunello be 100% Sangiovese. Wine was impounded, some was declassified, and the United States — Brunello’s biggest export market — briefly threatened to block imports unless Italy could certify the wine’s purity. The scandal forced a reckoning: in a 2008 referendum, Montalcino’s growers voted decisively to keep Brunello 100% Sangiovese, reaffirming the identity that made the wine great. The episode shook the region precisely because Brunello’s whole reputation rests on that single-grape purity.⁵

Banfi, and the making of a global name

Montalcino’s rise from sleepy backwater to world-famous name was not only the work of old families. In the late 1970s and ’80s the American wine company Banfi, run by the Mariani brothers, bought up a vast estate and poured in modern investment and marketing muscle, industrialising production and introducing Brunello to a huge new American audience. To purists, Banfi’s scale and style were controversial; but there is little doubt that its ambition helped turn Brunello from a connoisseur’s secret into one of the most sought-after wines on the global market.⁶

What Brunello tastes like, and how to drink it

Brunello is Sangiovese at its most powerful. Expect a deep garnet colour and aromas of ripe black cherry, dried plum, leather, tobacco, balsamic herbs and a touch of earth, all carried on firm tannins and bright acidity. Young Brunello is intense and often tightly wound; the best examples reward a decade or two in the cellar, softening into something profound and velvety. Serve it with the food it was born beside — bistecca alla fiorentina, wild boar, game and aged pecorino — and, for a younger or lesser vintage, decant it well ahead. It is a wine that repays patience at every step.⁷

Brunello vs Chianti

People often ask how Brunello differs from Chianti, since both are Tuscan and both are Sangiovese. The grape is the same, but almost everything else is not. Chianti comes from the cooler hills between Florence and Siena and is usually a blend, made to be relatively approachable; Brunello comes from the hotter hill of Montalcino to the south, must be 100% Sangiovese, and is aged for years into something far more powerful and long-lived. Put simply, Chianti is Tuscany’s great everyday red and Brunello its grand occasion — the same grape taken to its most serious extreme.¹

Keep exploring

• Tuscan wine: Chianti, Brunello and the Super Tuscans
• Chianti: the everyday face of Tuscan Sangiovese
• Sangiovese: the blood of Jove behind Brunello
• Italian wine: the complete history

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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Native Wine Grapes of Italy

Ian D’Agata

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Sources & further reading

1. Kerin O’Keefe, Brunello di Montalcino: Understanding and Appreciating One of Italy’s Greatest Wines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) — the definitive study; and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Brunello di Montalcino.” University of California Press. ↩
2. O’Keefe, Brunello di Montalcino (UC Press, 2012), on Clemente Santi and the Biondi-Santi family; and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Biondi-Santi.” Oxford Reference. ↩
3. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Brunello di Montalcino” and “DOCG”; and Nicolas Belfrage MW, Brunello to Zibibbo: The Wines of Tuscany, Central and Southern Italy (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003) — on the 1980 DOCG and the ageing rules. ↩
4. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Rosso di Montalcino.” ↩
5. O’Keefe, Brunello di Montalcino (UC Press, 2012) — on the 2008 “Brunellopoli” affair and the referendum to keep Brunello 100% Sangiovese; and “Brunello blending scandal,” Decanter. decanter.com. ↩
6. O’Keefe, Brunello di Montalcino (UC Press, 2012); and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Banfi.” ↩
7. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Brunello di Montalcino” and “Sangiovese” — on style and food pairing. ↩