Siro Pacenti Wine

Italian Wine, Tuscany

About Siro Pacenti

Giancarlo Pacenti is one of the leaders of the younger generation of innovative Montalcinesi who take inspiration and new ideas from outside of the zone and often beyond Italian borders. His two vineyards lie in two very different areas of Montalcino: one to the northeast of the town, where the wines develop full, ripe qualities; and one to the hotter southwest area near Sant’Angelo in Colle, which produces a more powerful, minerally wine. The Rosso is considered to be one of the very best, with the fruit’s inherent structure delicately enhanced by a brief passage in barriques (the 2006 vintage has just received 90 points from Parker). Since the 1995 vintage, his Brunello has repeatedly won Gambero Rosso's most prestigious Tre Bicchieri (Three Glass) award in addition to 90+ scores from all the major international publications.

"Giancarlo Pacenti is among the small number of producers who doesn’t bottle single-vineyard wines, instead he prefers to blend the juice from his holdings across the zone to make one Brunello, which he thinks yields a wine with greater balance than single-vineyard wines are capable of. Tasting his wines, the 2003 Brunello in particular, its awfully hard to disagree with this approach. Pacenti believes his long-standing collaboration with the University of Bordeaux paid huge dividends in 2003. Pacenti reported that, as expected, his oldest vineyards held up best during the scorching-hot vintage. Between the small amount of juice the grapes contained and the burnt fruit that was tossed at the sorting table, yields were down about 35%. Fermentation was done at lower temperatures than normal in order to avoid extracting astringent tannins. Pacenti also reduced the amount of new oak to 50-60% from the more typical 70-80%, using the higher percentages of new oak for his oldest vineyards. The Brunello was aged in a cellar kept to a lower temperature than normal in order to slow down the wine’s development. As outstanding as the Brunello is, readers should not ignore the 2006 Rosso." -- The Wine Advocate, May 2, 2008