2018 Fanti Brunello di Montalcino Tuscany 750 ml

Fanti’s wines overdeliver like few others in the category, putting $75 quality in the glass for well under $50—and leading to the kind of repeat purchases that reminded us of teenagers going to see Jurassic Park over and over again in the theater.

The 2018 is a brilliant follow-up to our last two wildly popular offerings. Vinous declared “Fanti really outdid themselves; the 2018 Brunello is a beauty.” Wine Advocate’s Monica Larner wrote “Brunello is released five years after the harvest precisely to allow complexity to develop in the bottle. That careful evolution has transpired nicely here.”

The Fanti family has deep roots in Montalcino, having owned their estate in the celebrated Castelnuovo dell’Abate zone since the early 1800s. The gorgeous property is over 700 acres, 123 of which are covered by Filippo Fanti’s meticulously farmed vineyards. 

South-facing, consisting of sandy and poor soils, Fanti’s vineyard land is ideal for grape cultivation, and Filippo and his daughter Elisa do it the hard way, removing weeds manually and using only natural fertilizers. As a result, both the old vines and the new plantings of low-yielding modern clones produce impeccably balanced Brunello that always shows beautiful generosity on release.

While 2018 was a hot, dry year in parts of Europe, central Italy saw a vintage marked by cooler temperatures and scattered rainfall—and that played into Fanti’s hands. Their meticulousness in the vineyard meant they weren’t troubled by disease pressure, aggressively de-leafing to improve airflow. And when it came time to put their blends together, they leaned heavily on grapes from Le Macchiarelle, one of the warmest and oldest-vine sections of their vineyard, which is bottled as a stand-alone Riserva some years.