Our Wine Choice: Tenuta Monteti Toscana Caburnio 2016

They say that the more you know about the history of a winery, the more you are able to appreciate the wine produced there. That’s hard to dispute, though of course it has little relevance when you are tasting blind. In fact, in that situation, it sort of works in reverse. When you reveal the bottle after tasting, the sight of the label can send you down memory lane.

And for me, that was one reason for choosing the Tenuta Monteti Toscana Caburnio 2016 this week. But the main reason is the wine itself.

It’s a blend of 55 percent cabernet sauvignon, together with approximately equal measures of alicante bousquet and merlot – a selection of grapes coming from the 45 contiguous micro-vineyard plots on 28 hectares, each of which has its designated fermentation vat in the cellar. The wine is aged for 12 months before bottling, half of it in a mix of old and new barriques and tonneaux, the other half in stainless steel. Then follows another year in bottle before release.

What makes this wine so appealing is the freshness of fruit, particularly considering its age. Crystal-clear blackcurrants and blackberries pervade the wine from start to finish, with just a smattering of spice from the oak and the alicante component. The tannins are enveloped very nicely in the texture of the wine. I described the wine as “not particularly complex, but refined and expressive,” and that means it has “drinkability” written all over it.

The land that was to become the Monteti estate was acquired in 1998 by Paolo Baratta, a Milanese economist and ex-government cabinet minister, and his wife, Gemma, who had for many years been searching for a suitable plot and enlisted the support of Carlo Ferrini, the renowned Tuscan consulting enologist (now also a producer in his own right), to realize their winemaking dream. The first commercial vintage of both Caburnio and the flagship wine of the estate, Monteti, a blend including petit verdot, was 2004.

And the memory it sparked was of a road trip I did with Carlo around the Maremma region in Southern Tuscany. I can’t remember the exact year, but it was in the very early 2000s. We stopped off at Monteti only briefly, due to a very busy schedule as I remember.

But I remember clearly Carlo’s enthusiasm as he told me the story of carving out vineyard plots from scratch and planting the varieties that most suited the varied terroir on the estate, in order to produce wines under the less restrictive Toscana IGT appellation.

And here we are, 20 years later with a lovely wine. Memories don’t add points to the score of a wine, but even sketchy recollections can make drinking it all the more pleasurable.

– Jo Cooke, Tastings Editor