Falling stars in Montalcino

Saturday morning at 11 the Consorzio del Brunello producers’ association will officially make public their rating, expressed in stars, for the 2017 harvest, the wine from which will reach markets in 2022. Ahead of appointment allow me a few observations.

For years now the Brunello producers in Montalcino have organized a tasting in Montalcino to evaluate and rate, in stars, the latest harvest, in this case 2017. We have never given this rating too much importance to this but some observations are in order.

Personally, I have always been critical, perhaps too much so, of the ratings given which for me are always too optimistic and sometimes result in colossal mistakes, like the five-star, top rating given to vintage 1997 while the 1999 and 2001 harvests received four stars. Since 2003, there have been a slew of four or five-star ratings with the only exception being 2014 that was given three stars (“a commendable vintage” for us, ed.note). Over the years these optimistic evaluations have damaged both the image of the wine and credibility of the producers’ association.

This year the Consorzio del Brunello, personified by its director Giacomo Pondini, decided to make a change and invited to the tasting a limited number of wine journalists so they could witness how these ratings were arranged and perhaps offer a different view than that of their experts. We all liked the idea and enthusiastically took part also to try and understand how certain conclusions were drawn. We journalists were outnumbered but at least it was a start.

The tasting was illuminating and I understood, at least in part, why their evaluations were so generous. There was a basic flaw in the guidelines adopted in the evaluation charts and even the samples tasted were misleading. Added to this was a certain benevolence on the part of the experts and all this explained why optimism triumphed despite the possible consequences.

1st problem: The samples

It was a good decision to divide the appellation into at least four sectors but it was wrong that the participating estates sent samples without stating how much wine they made. Thus while the chosen estates represented over 60% of the producing vineyards, in reality they represented in the neighborhood of 20% of the actual Brunello produced. My advice is to send a third party, like Valoritalia, to select the more representative wines.

2nd problem: The evaluation charts

The charts used, based on ratings of one to 100, allow for 20 points to be given for how the wine looks. This makes absolutely no sense because if such young wines did not have lovely and bright colors they would be poured down the drain. The rest of the guidelines are for the most part focused on emphasizing the lack of any winemaking mistakes, something that should be abandoned in 2018. If you screw up making wine in Montalcino then you should be taken behind the barn and shot. The end result is that the ratings are ingenuously high due to inadequacy of the guidelines adopted on the evaluation charts and too few points remaining to make a difference.

Another problem is that the five-star rating is applied to a range of wines that is too broad given that it is awarded to those with 85 points and up. In other words, no one in the world would consider a wine with an 85/100 rating to be a top or prestigious wine and thus the five-star should be reserved for wines with at least an average rating of 90 points.

In the discussions we had after the tasting, the consensus among we journalists was that 2017 was a 3-star vintage (at most 3.5) while some experts were giving it a 4+ rating and others even a five-star rating, which was off the wall to say the least.

We’ll find out tomorrow how it went.

A REMINDER

The ratings in stars correspond to the following classification:

*         insufficient

**        discreet

***       good

****     excellent

*****  exceptional