2012 Brancaia Ilatraia IGT Rosso Toscano 750 ml

Luxury Super Tuscan Eclipses the Best

Brancaia has made a lasting impression, cracking Wine Spectator’s Top 10 wines in the world twice, landing at #10 and #9. This excellence is on display in the 2012 Brancaia Ilatraia IGT, a powerful and elegant Cabernet-based Super Tuscan from the coastal Maremma, where blends like Sassicaia and Ornellaia have been seducing serious collectors for years. It’s hard to find a critic who wasn’t roundly impressed with the 2012 Ilatraia: Wine Spectator placed it on their Top 100 List of 2015 and gave it 94 points — on par with $625 Masseto, and one more than the iconic $235 Sassicaia, $325 Solaia and $240 Ornellaia. This is serious Tuscan luxury to equal — and even eclipse — some of the best in the business, at a fraction of the price.

Brancaia has been on our radar since more than a decade ago, when the Tuscan producer, which owns gorgeous properties in Chianti and in the coastal Maremma, placed two wines in Wine Spectator’s Top 10 just three years apart. One of those wines — Brancaia’s Sangiovese-dominated Tignanello-challenger “Il Blu,” which placed at #9 on Spectator’s list — awakened us to the wonders that proprietor Barbara Kronenberg-Widmer and winemaker Fabrizio Benedetti are working out on the Tuscan coast.

Wine Enthusiast Winemaker of the Year Carlo Ferrini is the mastermind consultant behind the 2012 Brancaia “Ilatraia,” far and away the estate’s richest, most age-worthy, and sumptuously structured release to date.

Ferrini works closely with Barbara Widmer, the current oenologist and daughter of Brigitte and Bruno Widmer, a Swiss couple who in 1981 purchased Brancaia, which was in disrepair. They 32`11`painstakingly restored the Chianti Classico estate and within just a few years had elevated it to super-star status. Today, the estate can boast of numerous accolades and praise from every major critic, including placements in Wine Spectator’s Top 100, nearly 20 Gambero Rosso Tre Bicchieri awards, and gold medals from the Decanter World Wine Awards.

The 2012 “Ilatraia,” a Decanter World Wine Awards gold-medal winner and Wine Spectator Top 100 wine, is a hand-harvested, sun-kissed coastal blend of 40% Cabernet Sauvignon, 40% Petit Verdot, and 20% Cabernet Franc — fruit that displays serious density and boldness of fruit, as well as intense aromatics of tobacco, cedar, and turned earth. The wine gets a luxurious Bordelaise treatment in the cellar, aging for 18 months in French oak, half of it new, before slumbering another year in the bottle. Now with several more years of bottle age, the tannins are beautifully integrated, and this wine is ready for its time at the table, or another decade in the cellar.