Brunello di Montalcino Rosa

Rosa is one of the parcel selections Stella di Campalto began bottling separately from the 2016 vintage. Until then Podere San Giuseppe released essentially a single Brunello di Montalcino, plus the occasional Riserva. From 2016 she started following her Sangiovese parcel by parcel and giving each wine its own name, and Rosa is one of that first group.

Like every Brunello it is one hundred percent Sangiovese, here grown biodynamically on the warm south-eastern shoulder of Montalcino below Castelnuovo dell'Abate. The farming is Demeter-certified and the winemaking is deliberately hands-off: a gravity-fed cellar, spontaneous fermentation on native yeasts, long aging in old large casks, and bottling unfined and unfiltered with very little sulphur.

What sets these bottlings apart is patience. Stella holds each wine back until she judges it ready, and every bottle is entirely from the vintage on the label, never topped up from another year. Rosa 2016 spent about forty-three months in wood and more than five years in bottle, so it reached the market roughly a decade after the harvest. Production was tiny, around twelve thousand 750 ml bottles with a small run of magnums and jeroboams. The label is embossed with the word Amore.