Brunello di Montalcino, today, is without great doubt. the greatest expression of the Sangiovese, the most widely bred grape variety in Italy, and undisputed king of Tuscan viticulture.

But Montalcino's winemaking history began well before Brunello: traces of it can be found as early as 1550, when the Bolognese friar Leandro Alberti, in his "Descrittione di tutta Italia," wrote that Montalcino was "... much named in the country for li buoni vini chi si cavano da quelli ameni colli ...".

In 1553, during the siege of the Spanish troops commanded by Don Garcia of Toledo of the city, Marshal de Montluc, commander of the Sienese Garrison, "He would arrub his face with a robust vermilion wine".

Even in the seventeenth century, there are many chronicles and travel books about Montalcino wine, although at that time the most popular was its white, mentioned by the Dutch Francesco Scoto in his famous guidebook "Itinera Italiane", the most popular travel manual of the century, : "... Montalcino, famous for its Moscadelli ...".

To get to a "scientific" approach, both from an agronomic and enological point of view, we have to leap forward almost three centuries, and arrive at the mid-nineteenth century, when Clemente Santi, Giuseppe Anghirelli, Tito Costanti and Camillo Galassi deepen studies of grapes and winemaking systems.

A key step in arriving at the Brunello we know today, Codified in the second half of the century by Ferruccio Biondi Santi, who first vinified Sangiovese by himself and aged that wine for long years in barrels: thus was born a strong, velvety wine, resembling in nothing to other more renowned aging reds, called Brunello, most likely, because of its color.

The oldest bottle, preserved by Tenuta il Greppo, dates back to 1888, but that intuition was espoused, studied and improved by a small group of Montalcino winemakers and families: Colombini, Franceschi and Angelini, the only ones to bottle it at the time besides the Biondi-Santi, but also Costanti and Padelletti (Guido, a professor of law at the University of Rome, had shared Garibaldi's struggles with Ferruccio Biondi Santi), On a growth path that came to a halt in the second half of the 1930s., when phylloxera brought the entire Italian viticulture to its knees.

That to see the light again he had to wait for the 1960s and 1970s: In 1966 came Doc recognition, and the following year, April 18, 1967, the Consorzio del Brunello di Montalcino.

Fame, by this time, had abundantly crossed national borders, but the real boom would take a few more years: in the 1980s and 1990s, investment and commercial efforts multiplied, techniques of the quintessential pure Sangiovese are still being refined, which becomes what we know today, which is one of the greatest, most sought-after and award-winning wines in the world.