Tuscany’s best recent vintages plus the top wines to try

The best Tuscan vintages are not always the easiest.

In 2010 there was a chance of real glory, but you needed to earn it right through a season seemingly laden with bear traps – life was easier for the perennially attentive producers able and willing to sacrifice crop for quality in order to capture 2010’s elegance, both in terms of fruit clarity and tannic finesse.

The follow-on 2011 was the difficult child, scolded by brutal Saharan heat just before harvest – a small crop required laborious selection, which the best producers handled with sweat and skill.

Tuscany 2013 can divide opinion, but it is a favourite of mine: wines with backbone, a sense of purpose and crystalline fruit expression.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for Monty Waldin’s top four picks from five great recent Tuscan vintages

The final two vintages would be called ‘a pair’ in Bordeaux, almost as if in 2015 the oven had been turned up a notch too high, with 2016 providing a tempering correction.

The best 2015s are rich rather than dense, and the fruit needs time to unfold its full complexity.

2016 is the beautiful child, still in its infancy – the best vintage since 2004 (when I began spending much of my time in Tuscany), its joyful transparency is tempting now, but deceptively ageworthy.

Vintage breakdowns

2010

Tuscany’s best estates produced silky, saline wines with good acidity and finesse in 2010, similar to those from 2004. The best of these wines display mouthwatering clarity and are now coming into their prime.

A cold winter gave the vines a proper cool down after the previous year’s at times relentless heat. But a gloomy early spring with sporadic rain set nerves jangling, not least because the overcast conditions affected fruit-set. This reduced the potential crop – a worry at any time, but especially so in an era of heavy investment in vineyard replanting, and winery and agritourism upgrades.

Fortunately, the summer of 2010 was hot (if not exactly roasting), another slight worry for growers that in the end proved welcome for Tuscany’s flagship-but-fussy Sangiovese, a late-ripening grape that craves heat and light, but neither to excess.

Podere Forte’s Giovanni Mazzoni called 2010 ‘the equilibrium vintage’, and well-drilled vineyards, whether already established ones such as Castell’in Villa or (then) relatively new ones like Podere Forte, made wines of real transparency.

Yet Giampiero Pazzaglia of Grattamacco notes that ‘grape yield management was crucial in 2010’.

Overloaded and over-leafy vines with shaded fruit risked rotten, burst or diluted grapes and flavours, limiting potential for bottle ageing.The harvest brought bouts of both rain and sun and thus a risk of more rot, but slow ripening did make picking only the ripe and clean eminently feasible.

Capezzana in Carmignano, which was in the throes of a welcome quality revolution, patiently picked Merlot and Cabernet grapes a month apart for optimum ripeness, cool-fermenting them to showcase 2010’s engaging, ethereal style.

2011

Tuscany produced near-identical numbers of bottles in 2010 and 2011, but their respective contents were anything but: 2011 is a somewhat idiosyncratic vintage for Tuscany.

The best reds were engaging, exuberant, fluid and smooth almost straight out of the box. Such easygoing immediacy is not generally part of Tuscany’s red wine playbook. But 2011 is less evenly ripe compared to 2010, despite it often having been hotter.

A combination of badly timed rain events, followed by suffocating blasts of Saharan winds before harvest, created uneven bunch ripeness, requiring fiddly, costly grape selection. Vines on airy, humus-rich soils seem to have fared best in avoiding water-logging, heat stress, or both.

At San Polino in Montalcino, Katia Nussbaum and Luigi Fabbro encourage forest floor-like ecology, whereby vine roots get the nutrients they need while giving enough back to sustain the soil microbe providers. A similar science-based but natural approach is taken by Stefano Amerighi and his eponymous estate in Cortona, where he grows Syrah.

Amerighi brought the harvest forward, and was then kept busy fermenting 25 separate lots, averaging 400 bottles from each before stitching them all together like a bespoke jacket with myriad fine threads.

Paolo de Marchi of Isole e Olena in Chianti Classico also brought the harvest forward for his 100% Sangiovese SuperTuscan flagship Cepparello, to maintain freshness.

The heat was less problematic in the Chianti Rùfina DOCG, in north Tuscany’s cool Apennine mountains, for Enrico Lippi of Frascole. ‘Controlling the sun’s effect in bright areas like ours means knowing which and how many leaves individual vines need for shade and sugar creation,’ he says.

2013

The 2013 vintage started wet and ended up a late show after a run of precocious, torrid, climate change-affected harvests.

Francesco Galgani of Cappella Sant’Andrea in San Gimignano (of Vernaccia white wine fame) says: ‘2013’s cooler season made it a great white vintage for us, but the Chianti Colli Senesi DOCG reds also show mouthwatering precision and refinement for drinking in the medium term.’

A short drive east, in Radda in Chianti, is Zonin 1821’s Castello di Albola. Its 2013 vintage was influenced by the advice of the late professor Denis Dubourdieu, a globally renowned and respected academic and wine-grower from Bordeaux.

Alessandro Gallo, Castello di Albola’s winemaker, says: ‘We’d already adopted lighter-touch oak ageing, switching from barrels to much larger oak vats. They make sense here, at the limit of where Sangiovese can still ripen fully. Knowing the precise moment to pick, especially in cooler years, allows winemaking that can be more creative yet absolutely traditional. Denis Dubourdieu said the common mistake is to try to extract something in the grape – colour or tannins – which is not there to begin with.’

In Montalcino, smaller estates such as Capanna di Cencioni, or those with plentiful pickers, had an easier time.

My favourite 2013 wines have delicate, crisp, clean, ripe fruit with smooth, sophisticated tannins. These wines are more diverting and have fresher acidity compared to the brasher 2012s.

Beppe Rigoli’s Fattoria Ambra fulfils my organoleptic wish list with his classically constructed Montalbiolo Riserva Carmignano, made from wine’s equivalent of both denim and silk: smooth yet robust, with zippy appeal.

2015

As Mother Nature scrupulously recalibrated after 2014’s near torrential washout, 2015 was very sunny, hot and dry in Tuscany.

The region’s best 2015 reds were unusually expressive: soft and easy to enjoy yet well built.

The Chianti Classicos were mouthwatering and especially juicy from cooler, higher-altitude estates such as Monteraponi (420m-570m), where streams and forests provide grapes with natural, biodiverse forms of air-conditioning. Monteraponi’s owner Michele Braganti ferments his wines with naturally occurring vineyard yeasts. ‘It is straightforward with juice from balanced vines, less so with heat-stressed ones,’ he explains.

The founders of Montecivoli, an organic-from-scratch vineyard in Scansano on the sun-bathed Tuscan coast, had already planned for hotter vintages when planting in 1999. They eschewed irrigation systems for their now mature Sangiovese vines to develop coping skills for hotter, brighter, drier conditions.

Further north up the coast is Duemani, or ‘two hands’ – those of Elena Celli, whose background is the fashion industry, and Luca D’Attoma, an internationally known wine-growing and winemaking consultant. Their vineyard is rare, having been biodynamically farmed from day one. ‘We see the mainly plant-based biodynamic treatments as both a quality tool and a buffer against climate change, which is making drought and downpours more severe,’ they say.

Sebastiano Cossia Castiglioni of Querciabella in Greve in Chianti links climate change with poor animal welfare, so applies vegan principles to his Chianti Classico and SuperTuscan vineyards in Greve in Chianti. One other key debate is whether Tuscany’s follow-up 2016 vintage is even better than 2015. I think it is…

2016

The 2016 reds combine 2015’s hedonism, 2010’s finesse and a rare crystalline fruit expression all of their own. The best are unputdownable.

In the Maremma on the Tuscan coast, Elena Pozzolini of Tenuta Sette Cieli got some much-needed winter rain and stress-free vines in the summer, with no heat spikes. ‘Hot days and cool nights meant that being patient rewarded us with really good skin ripeness in the Cabernet Franc for our Scipio,’ she says. ‘We could leave the new wine on the grape skins for longer than normal. There was zero risk of herbaceous flavours.’

Further inland, Virginie Saverys of Avignonesi also had some welcome spring rain, while the run-up to harvest brought ‘weeks of gorgeous weather with high temperature differences between night and day, which made for bright, appetising wines’, resulting in ‘a great vintage’.

Paolo de Marchi called 2016 ‘cool, just perfect. You just had to be patient and wait for the tannins to ripen’. This was a policy clearly also adopted by other quality-minded estates, such as ColleMassari, further south in Montecucco.

Livewire winemaker Andrea Lonardi of Val di Suga in Montalcino sums up why 2016 was so special: ‘It was a cooler vintage in which vines, in particular Sangiovese, produced perfectly ripe tannins and perfectly ripe fruit,’ he says. ‘To get this combination even in a normal year is rare. Tannin and ripeness don’t automatically go in tandem, so to get this, post-climate change, makes 2016 really very notable.’

As 2015 and 2016 mature in bottle, the 2015s will likely show balsamic notes and drier tannins, whereas the 2016s should show fresher, fruitier and clearer notes.

Waldin’s pick: Four standout wines from each vintage to try

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