Christopher Deas, Italian Wine Merchants: "Simply stunning, its another mediation wine from Gianfranco and Monica Soldera. Where many 2015s Brunellos are about opulence and have more baby fat to them, the Soldera Sangiovese, for myself and the IWM team, offered more restraint and complexity, with signature fruit of the vintage lurking in the background. The magic of Soldera is truly an exercise in patience and time in the glass as it shows best with age or slow aeration. We tasted this wine over 48 hours and with air the young 2015 Soldera is capable of mesmerizing today. With time, you can expect nuances of black cherry, wild berries, citrus peel, crushed flowers, sweet tobacco, saddle leather, forest floor, mushrooms, game, walnut, spice, with a salty minerality. While quiet at first, the wine becomes super expressive and you find layer upon layer of complexity each time you go back to the glass. It truly one of those ethereal wines of mediation where you find yourself searching for adjectives and descriptors. It is one of the last great vintages under the guidance of Gianfranco with his daughter Monica. As Monica has mentioned, it is a wine that delivers a “rainbow of emotions” and that is on the aromatics alone for IWM. This is a must wine to experience.”
- Country: Italy
- Region: Toscana
- Subregion: Brunello di Montalcino
Gianfranco Soldera, who passed away in February 2019 at the age of 82, earned the reputation of being Brunello’s most accomplished craftsman. A fanatical, uncompromising perfectionist, Soldera made his Case Basse di Soldera estate to be something of a viticultural wonderland that he mindfully created to encourage biodiversity. “Terroir” is the word at Soldera’s Case Basse estate, whose vineyards are wholly devoted to growing Sangiovese Grosso in its two historic plots, the five-acre Case Basse and the 11-acre Intistieti. As a winemaker, Soldera was as precise and meticulous regimen in the vineyard, where he used a painstaking manual approach for many procedures, as he was in the cantina, which he designed and built from free-sitting stone blocks for perfect airflow; created in this Utopian environment, the otherworldly wines of Case Basse are unlike any others. In 2012, Soldera was hit by an act of vandalism that caused him to lose most of his estate’s production for the vintages of 2007-2012, causing his wines to become yet more sought-after and collectable. A year later, Soldera left the Consorzio del Vino Brunello di Montalcino, parting ways with the ruling body of the Brunello DOCG over a dispute that led to a law suit. While no longer called Brunello, Soldera’s wines sit in their own category, nearly unrivaled by any others. The Case Basse di Soldera estate continues in the hands of Gianfranco’s wife, Graziella, and his children, Monica and Mauro.
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