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A Note from Sergio

When you drive from Camogli, where I'm currently living, to Montalcino, you take the Aurelia, a road built by Caesar and his armies. The road, now a civilized highway of multiple lanes that's tamed by speed limits, serves as a way to travel, but it's also a pretty good metaphor for the trip. The hills in and around Camogli drop to the sea, and the Saturday that I drove to Montalcino for Benvenuto Brunello, a tasting open to the industry, journalists and the public, the sea was flat and the serene blue-gray of hammered tin. You drive past the ravaged white mountains of Carrera, blocks of marble piled like kids' toys in shipping yards. The hills give way to flatness around Pisa, like they're stretching out to take a nap, but the sea is still visible, flickering like a faulty light in the distance. You turn off the Aurelia at Grosseto, a flat, sprawling city in Maremma, and then, suddenly, a shift. The hills wake up again, stretch and rise, and you know you're nearing the heart of Toscana.

The Aurelia may be Caesar's highway covered in blacktop, but the towns in Toscana seem untouched. Cars squeeze around corners best suited to horses. The saffron orange buildings look organic, carved out of--or into--the hills. The spires of the churches mirror the spikes of the Cyprus, which grow everywhere, pointing like fingers toward God. Things have changed, of course, but what hits you is how much hasn't. The stone piazza bare of electric lights, swept clean and smelling as you imagine they did when they were built nearly a thousand years ago. The water pump tucked into the corner for passersby and their donkeys. The hills roll like carpet; bare and brown in winter, they seem even more primeval than they do in summer. You can see the rocks, the moss, the Tuscan earth; you can imagine the cinghiali storming through the underbrush. The country rests these last few days of winter, but it's inescapable. It's everywhere, in everything you eat, in everything you drink.

In Toscana at Pescina's Silene restaurant, I ate succulent baby goat, roasted delicately; I ate rabbit, lovingly deep-fried; I ate lamb roasted in honey that the chef himself had made from family beehives, as the rabbit had come from his father. Everything, from the tiny wild asparagus I ate sautéed over pasta, to the yellow apples I ate in pastry for dessert, tasted of Toscana: fresh, vaguely wild, and intrinsically of that place alone--and no other.

Montalcino is a magical place. Even when hordes of tourists wander Brunello-dazed, canvas wine bag around their necks and wine glass clenched in their hands marking them as flat-footed tourists, the magic swirls and glistens. There is a reason why Brunello has exploded, and done so to the point of saturation, even to the point of scandal. And that reason is Montalcino; it imbues everything it touches, as long as what it touches is real, authentic, and genuinely Tuscan. You can taste it in the food, smell it in the air, and when the Brunello is good, you can breathe it into your nose, hold it in your mouth and swallow it whole. The stone, the earth, the water, the sun, the Cyprus, the olive trees, the cinghiali--it's all there, in every whiff, in every sip, and this is what I look for in a Brunello.

This week, I'm proud to bring you a selection of some genuine Brunello from 2006, one of the best years that I've seen in a long time. There has been a lot of buzz circulating around the '06 Brunello, and I tasted many at Benvenuto Brunello last weekend. The ones I've chosen are good, very good, very real and very Tuscan. They'll take you Montalcino faster than the Aurelia. Open one and share it with someone who'll listen for the cinghiali with you as you drink. If you're quiet enough, you might just hear them.