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| Monte Bernardi “Sangió” Chianti Classico DOCG 2023 $26 Monte Bernardi “Retromarcia” Chianti Classico DOCG 2024 $32 Monte Bernardi Chianti Classico Riserva DOCG 2022 $38 Monte Bernardi Chianti Classico “MB193” DOCG 2022 $48 Monte Bernardi Chianti Classico Riserva “Sa’etta” DOCG 2022 $56 |
| This week, we’re hosting a special guest, Michael Schmelzer of the exceptional Chianti Classico estate, Monte Bernardi. We nearly always have one or more Monte Bernardi wines gracing our shelves, because they represent everything we love in old school Chianti Classico—and there’s a lot to love. Gastronomic wines with mouthwatering freshness and a fine girdling of tannin, tamed, just enough, by the judicious use of large, old barrels. Organic farming, and no crap added during fermentation. But you really cannot tell the tale of modern Chianti Classico without starting with how fucked up it is: much of the wine made in the denomination, and in the larger Chianti DOCG, are deracinated, dull bottles, victims of the marketplace and modernity. This hell-in-a-handbasket is set against the backdrop of the popular idea of Chianti, the woven straw enrobed wines that once graced the tables of neighborhood red-checked-tablecloth restaurants, of which the less is said, the better (Michael did bottle a wine in that packaging, but put something confoundingly good inside of it, so there’s that). This overly familiar perception of Chianti has not done it any good, and there is no hipster, edge-of-the-envelope pushing movement reinvigorating it today. Instead, tradition, or better put, the recovery of tradition, is paramount here, as the tragedy of Chianti is that most of what once made it distinctive began to fade away with modernization, i.e., over-cropped industrial wines that only need to meet a certain price point, but also over-ripe wines, often aged in new oak barrels, that taste like wine made from anywhere. Monte Bernardi is part of a small group of growers who have reclaimed the honor of Chianti by returning to the old ways that once dominated the region, while also recovering its terroir-driven expression.
Monte Bernardi makes the sort of Chianti you can reach for nearly any night of your life: animated, medium-bodied wines brimming with brambly wild fruit and unalloyed by the depredations of toasty, new oak barrels. These are wines that you can drank without a care in the world, but at the same time, you will find them to be consummate gastronomic wines that you can enjoy with a wide range of simple, earthy foods, ranging from pizza to a bloody steak. The focus here is on the traditional primary player in Chianti, sangiovese, with sometimes a smattering of canaiolo nero. Michael purchased the historic Monte Bernardi estate nearly 25 years ago, after attending enology school in Australia, where he stayed and made a quite different sort of wine than he makes today. The focus at the estate is on traditional Chianese varieties, primarily sangiovese. (Michael also makes a red wine from international varieties that cannot be classified as a Chianti Classico—it’s incredibly good, not oaky—as well as a bianco, which is not imported to the States.) Monte Bernardi is graced with a range of altitudes, exposures, and soil types, allowing Michael to make a range of different expressions. The soil in Chianti is primarily “galestro,” a type of metamorphic shale, formed from ancient clay deposits, and nearly all of the Monte Bernardi wines contain some fruit grown on it, but there’s also limestone, and in some areas, sandstone. Michael will present wines grown on all of these varied soils, including an exciting wine from an old vineyard he purchased in 2018, planted with a promiscuous co-plantation of various grapes, as was the practice one hundred years ago. |