Regional Spotlight - Montecucco
We've all had that blissful feeling of drinking an amazing wine. When you have that bottle, you never forget the place you drank it or the people you shared it with. But special wines take you one step further, transporting you to the very place it came from. You can see yourself amongst the vines; you can hear the bees buzzing around, the wind catching the trees. You can imagine people harvesting the grapes, smiling, singing, and laughing with one another. The best wines of Montecucco have that ability to not just be something you drink, but something you truly experience. Delicious, pure Sangiovese made with equal parts passion and humility and a sense of place that extends far beyond the concept of terroir.
Tuscany is Italy's fertile crescent of food and wine. Chianti, Montepulciano, Montalcino; the Sangiovese-based wines from these regions reflect the global popularity and high quality of Tuscan wine. But as we all know, popularity breeds imitation and larger productions, especially in the wine world. Obviously there are numerous brilliant wines from these regions; we work with a number of them, but traditional methods are often neglected in pursuit of a more internationally accepted style. Deeply extracted, fruit-forward, lavishly oaked wines made without a trace of Sangiovese's palate-tingling natural acidity.
Montecucco and its wines have been spared of this globalized style and uniformity. The region's best wines speak volumes about the local commitment to preserving Tuscan tradition. They are a pure expression of Sangiovese; elegant dried cherry flavors laced with strawberry and herbal nuances. You'll never see machine harvesting here, you might not even see a color TV. Grape harvest is a communal effort and a celebration of cultivating the land. The wines are food friendly beyond belief as the region is also home to some of Italy's finest Porcini mushrooms, black truffles, chestnuts, and olive oil, just to name a few.
We are most fortunate to work with the Begnardi family and their Lumi di Pigna wines. They are a perfect introduction to the essence of Montecucco. They deliver traditionally vinified wines, crafted without intervention and with the goal of showing beautifully at the dinner table. After all they've run a local trattoria for the past fifty years; they know a thing or two about food pairing. Growing up amongst the vines, brothers Lucca and Michele have taken their expert farming skills, employed traditional, simplistic winemaking technique, and ultimately produced some of the region's finest Sangiovese-based wines. Their love of family, tradition, and property is evident in every drop of their wine.
