2014 Badia di Morrona Chianti I Sodi del Paretaio 750 ml

Italy’s #1 Wine Guide Plays Favorites with Badia di Morrona

In Italy, no other critical authority comes close to rivaling the influence of the Rome-based gourmet food and wine publication Gambero Rosso. Founded in 1986 by the late Italian writer Stefano Bonilli, a pioneer of the Slow Food movement, the magazine issues a highly anticipated, once-a-year guide to the best Italian wines in a bright red booklet. When it lands, the wine industry in the Boot screeches to a halt as enologos from Lombardy to Sicily scan the index for their name to see how they size up. Its prestige is such that leading Italian politicians have been known to skip out on impossible-to-get La Scala opera tickets just to make it to a Gambero Rosso dinner.

So when Gambero greets a wine with effusive praise year after year, we take notice. Badia di Morrona’s Chianti I Sodi del Paretaio — a juicy, rich, voluptuous blend of Sangiovese, Cabernet, Merlot, and Syrah — is one of its most consistent darlings. Since Gambero Rosso first began profiling the winery in the 1990s, the guide has praised the I Sodi vintages to the sky, awarding multiple "Due Bicchieri" ("Two Glasses") honors and declaring it a “sincere, wonderfully drinkable wine” with “exceptional breadth on the nose” and an “especially good value.”

Don’t just take our word that today’s offer is one of the finest Tuscan red bargains you’ll come across in 2016 — take Gambero’s.

Badia di Morrona is situated amidst the postcard-perfect hills between Florence and Pisa. Badia means monastery in Italian, and it was 11th century Benedictine monks who first worked this land, which remained under church control up to the 1800s. Today Badia di Morrona is owned by the illustrious Count Gaslini Alberti, whose family has invested a fortune in the winery over the past 50 years. The count outfits his winemaker Corrado Dal Piazza with the best that money can buy, including a recently refurbished facility with restructured and enlarged cellars and new casks and barrels.

Dal Piazza is notoriously hard on the grapes that fill Badia’s 110 hectares of vineyards, which soak up the sun’s rays on south- and south-eastern exposed slopes, the soil strewn with chunks of white limestone. He tightened spacing to near-impossible levels, challenging each plant to a stressful summer game of Survival of the Fittest. These high-density clusters make for tiny berries of high skin-to-juice ratio, and Sangiovese of greater richness and phenolic complexity.

A long growing season allowed the world's most temperamental variety — one known for highly irregular ripening on the same bunch — to reach rare, almost perfectly uniform maturity. The vines stretched deep underground, sucking up the mineral imprint of the poor soil, putting out a dark, crushed-red-fruit Sangiovese, infused with garrigue and bracketed by perfectly ripe tannins. If you’re looking for vibrancy in your top-class Chianti, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything quite like this luscious 2014.

The 2014 Badia di Morrona Chianti I Sodi del Paretaio is bright ruby to the edge, with a fabulous nose of Pinot-like crushed cherries and raspberries, laced with thyme. Juicy and high-toned on the attack, with sneaky weight, and silken texture.

While you’re saving up for that $200 bottle of 2007 Castello Di Ama Vigneto La Casuccia, do yourself a favor and sock away a case of this stuff. You’ll thank us later. A scintillating $14/bottle for a few hours today, a not-to-be-missed bargain — bearing the stamp of approval of Italy’s most prestigious critics.