Le Ragnaie, Rosso di Montalcino “Ragnaie V.V.” Online now

Le Ragnaie, Rosso di Montalcino “Ragnaie V.V.”

A challenging vintage isn’t going to keep a great producer down. We’ve seen it time and time again. The latest example of this is on offer today: Le Ragnaie’s 2014 Rosso di Montalcino, which incorporates fruit normally reserved for the estate’s top-of-the-line “V.V.” (old-vine, or vecchie vigne) Brunello di Montalcino bottling.

Lovers of Le Ragnaie’s finessed, organically farmed wines know that this black label doesn’t usually grace a bottle of Rosso, but 2014 necessitated a pivot by the Campinoti family, who, not surprisingly, handled it nimbly. Normally, the estate produces four different Brunello di Montalcino bottlings, including three vineyard-designates, but in ’14 they decided to cut back yields and focus on producing earlier-drinking Rossos. The result, in this case, is a wine that combines Rosso di Montalcino’s accessibility and Brunello di Montalcino’s complexity. I don’t miss the richer extract and heavier oak treatment it would have had in Brunello form—this wine finds a Goldilocks-esque middle ground, and, as is always the case with Le Ragnaie, it showcases the perfumed, high-toned side of the Sangiovese as well as anyone in the Montalcino DOCG. What an exciting find!

Not that I’m at all surprised. Every time I taste Le Ragnaie’s wines, I think: Well, some people just “get it.” Since purchasing their estate in Montalcino in 2000, Riccardo and Jennifer Campinoti have been fast-rising stars in this crowded—and star-crossed—region. Montalcino is the big leagues, and Le Ragnaie has become a marquee player in relatively short order. Yes, it’s a beautiful property producing impeccable wines, but for me it all comes down to one question: How true is it to the Sangiovese grape, or, perhaps more accurately, how true is it to my Platonic ideal of the Sangiovese grape? What the greatest Brunello di Montalcino wines share, in my humble opinion, is a mixture of power and perfume, and of depth and nervous tension. 

The Campinotis farm organically, and their 15.5 hectares of vineyards are fall in three distinct subzones of Montalcino: Le Ragnaie, the estate’s home base in the central part of the zone, where their vineyards are among the highest-elevation sites in the appellation; the “Petroso” vineyard, on the western slopes of the Montalcino village; and estate parcels in Castelnuovo dell’Abate, the village on Montalcino’s southeastern slope. Today’s wine, bearing the “V.V.” moniker, includes Sangiovese from the estate’s oldest plantings (40+ years of age), aged in an assortment of mostly large-format oak barrels for nine months before bottling.

As I noted above, the appeal of this wine is that it is both complex and easy to drink. It’s a wine of depth, and dimension, but it doesn’t have the full-throttle intensity of a young Brunello. For that, frankly, I’m grateful—and prone to dive right in! In the glass, it’s a luminous, deep ruby with garnet reflections, with a well-knit perfume driven by bright fruit and savory earth: red cherry, black plum, red currant, blood orange peel, wet roses and violets, dry autumn leaves, clove, and other warm spices leap from the glass. The wine is medium-bodied, with an extremely perfumed and energetic personality. For those who prefer the prettier, more “Burgundian” styles of Brunello (think Soldera, Poggio di Sotto), this and pretty much anything else Le Ragnaie releases will be right up your alley. Decant this ’14 about 60 minutes before serving at 60-65 degrees in Bordeaux stems, ideally after you’ve already come home from the butcher shop with a nice bone-in ribeye or some other epic cut of beef. There’s plenty of mouth-watering acidity here to slice right through it. Enjoy!