Casanova di Neri is the estate that made modern Brunello respectable — proof that you could ripen Sangiovese to a darker, glossier register and still bottle something that tasted of Montalcino rather than of new oak. For a region that spent the 1990s at war with itself over exactly that question, it was a pointed argument to win.
The argument was settled in public. In 2006, Wine Spectator named the estate's Tenuta Nuova 2001 its Wine of the Year, and a modern-styled Montalcino was suddenly the most talked-about red of the season. Tenuta Nuova is the house statement: a rounder, more immediately generous Brunello drawn from the estate's younger holdings, made to be understood young without surrendering the structure that lets it age for decades.
Tenuta Nuova Brunello di Montalcino
The showpiece is only half the estate. Cerretalto, a single vineyard the family bottles only in the strongest years, is the cellar's traditionalist counterweight — its slowest-evolving, most austere wine, and the one critics score highest of all. Giacomo Neri, who has run the estate since his father's death in 1991, built both: the crowd-pleaser that made the name, and the connoisseur's bottle that keeps it honest.
Toscana
That range is the whole point. A producer still caricatured as a modernist in fact keeps a foot in both camps, which is why the name on a Montalcino shelf is less a fixed house style than a spectrum. Pick the cuvée and you pick how much of the old austerity you want left in the glass.
