Salicutti: the 2021 vintage has arrived

Podere Salicutti · Montalcino

The 2021 vintage has arrived

Hello,

Francesco Leanza was a chemist in Rome when, in the early 1990s, he bought a derelict farmhouse south-east of Montalcino. He planted Sangiovese in 1994. In 1996 his became the first label in Montalcino to carry the word biologico. Sabine Eichbauer, an architect from Munich’s Tantris family, drank his Rosso at Vinitaly in 2010 and bought the estate from him in 2016. Leanza stayed on for three vintages. He left five days before the 2018 harvest.

Today there are 4.5 boutique hectares within a wall around the house, three vineyards at 420 to 520 metres, Demeter-certified since 2022. The grapes are sorted berry by berry and fermented in concrete. The wines then spend more than three years in large casks. In 2021 the April frost hit the lower vineyards. Higher up, a warm summer was followed by a September of cool nights. Vinous calls the vintage “a triumph for Montalcino”. The three 2021 Brunellos have now arrived, together with the Teatro Riserva.

At 0.7 hectares Teatro is the smallest of the estate’s vineyards and the only one bottled as a Riserva, a year after the others. If you lay down one Brunello this year, make it this one.

See the Teatro →

One click adds them all to your basket. You can remove or swap single wines there.

Warm regards from Berlin,
Lisa and the Living Wines team

P.S. The Rosso di Montalcino 2023 starts out every year as Brunello. Only in the cellar is it decided whether the vintage can carry the long cask ageing. In 2023 the yield was twenty hectolitres per hectare, followed by 22 months in cask. The estate applies Monica Larner’s phrase “Holy Grail of Sangiovese purity” to this wine. Approx. €56.