Before drink it, place it back vertically and let it rest that way for almost a week as for the eldest bottles.

Then make it reach the drinking temperature (again 2 or 3 days). All the stages will have to take place slowly and gradually. If the wine is young (10-15 years old) the bottle should be uncorked 12 hours before drinking and poured off up to half its shoulder.

The elder is the wine the shorter will be the necessary time within uncorking and drinking operations.

The ideal glass suitable for this kind of wine is a "balloon", smaller and rounder than the "cognac" one. Also here, wine production, has always been faithful to those rules established through the years in Tuscan tradition.

Only at about the end of the last century the first experiments were starting to exalt and give value to the features of a unique raw material and a unique environment.

So the Brunello is born again and after years of improvement and ripening in barrels it shows itself, as renewed, to the public. The borderlines of the production area match those of the Commune of Montalcino.

The local farms offer many pleasant and interesting wine-tourism guided tours. The Commune of Montalcino is 40 Km south from Siena, direction Rome. The territory is within the Orcia river valley, the Asso river valley and the Ombrone river valley, circle-shaped with a diameter of 16 km and a surface of 24.000 hectares.

The Brunello wine from Montalcino, confirming what has been mentioned above, is a wine coming from growing, fermenting and improvement stages of "Sangiovese Grosso" vines (usually named in Montalcino as "Brunello grapes") clearly bright, brilliant and vivid garnet-red-coloured.

As the vine pest, the phylloxera, started spreading over after the Second World War, many local vines were lost: to save whatever can be saved, where the vine is delicate and disease risks are strong, some root-branches, grafted onto american stubs kept immune from the above mentioned plague, have been introduced in the Italian wine-system.

All this did not corrupt the quality and majesty of that superb wine from Montalcino, but on the contrary, the taking of those counter-measures has allowed that the Brunello can be tasted and enjoyed even nowadays (it is not the only one that was saved, anyway ...).

It has an intense, wide, persistent and airy smell; you can smell scents of underbrush, aromatic wood and a little vanilla. The best Brunello wine ever produced, that is the one of the best crops, affords the spreading of all these scents and grants a structure that only partly let your most experienced tasting papillas trace a hint of tannin (that is the substance existing in the berry skin or in the grape stalk that in jargon you say "allappa" (transl. "sets your mouth on edge"); it means that it gives you a sensation as if something covers the inner part of your mouth with a film that does not let any smell or taste enter.

If the Brunello can (and must) be preserved and ripened for a long time in wood barrels (French durmast, often) is just thanks to the ripening level that the grapes reach (at least the greatest part of them) before being put into the tanks to ferment.

As a matter of fact, the not fully ripened grapes yet have more tannin substance that protects the fermentation and only after a period of 5 years it reduces itself until it disappears, leaving a wine with a unique colour and a sharp and strong structure.

The Brunello is a wine that should be drunk alone, that is without matching or debasing it with other tastes coming from the kitchen.

The Brunello is a tasting or a meditation wine; just to counterbalance the alcohol presence you use to drink it at least with some bread, some flat-bread or some noble salami, like the Cinta Senese pork meat or the Colonnata bacon-fat.

If you want to accompany a meal with it, it is better to do it with roasted game or stewed meat with a very sharp taste, cooked with aromatic herbs, mushrooms or truffles.

The Brunello should be served in large and round crystal glasses called "balloons" so that you can smell the scent before letting it pass over the tasting papyllas. When aged for a long time, this wine needs to be poured into a pot for a time between 1 hour to 2 hours in order to deposit any eventual remains, to oxygenate it and to grant all of its structure.

The Brunello wine is usually served at a temperature of 20-22 ° C. In the exceptional crops 2 kinds of Brunello are produced: the Crop itself and the Vintage. In the good but not exceptional crops simply the Vintage is not produced.

After being almost unknown to many people out of the production area up to the 60’s, nowadays the Brunello wine from Montalcino, thanks to the spreading of the information service, to the opening of specific schools, sommeliers and wine and food diplomas, to the raising of the medium knowledge level about food and wine of Italian and foreign people, it is at the cutting-edge of the Italian wine panorma, as it is spread over the international market along with few others.

- Production area: Commune of Montalcino;
- Vine: Sangiovese Grosso ("Brunello");
- maximum yeld of grapes:80q/ha;- maximum yeld in wine: 68%;
- obligatory improvement in wood barrels : 2 years in durmast barrels
- obligatory improvement in bottles: 4 months (6 months for "Vintage");
- colour: intense rubin red tending to garnet red after ageing period;
- smell: characteristic and intense scent
- taste: dry, warm, slightly tannic, strong and harmonic;
- minimum alcohol presence: 12,5 % alc./vol.;
- min. total acidity: 5 gr/lt;
- minimum dry net extract: 24gr/lt; - bottling: it can be made only within the production area;
- trading: only 5 years after the grape-harvesting year (6 years for "Vintage" version);
- minimum dry net extract: 24gr/lt;
- packaging: the Brunello wine can be bottled and sold only in Bordeaux shaped bottles.