Event

Open Bottle - MonSanto Chianti Classico Riserva

Thursday, February 01, 2018

Time: 04:00pm - 08:00pm

Type: Wine Tasting

Location: The Wine Cabinet

Event Free

Every Thursday from 4:00 until 8:00 pm we open a special bottle of wine and offer to you at a highly discounted price.
The wines are typically 90 points or better and are discounted 20-40%. Sometimes even more! when we can get special pricing from our vendors , we pass the savings along to you!!
Come in on Thursday and sample. If you can't make it, call us and we can put some aside for you!! 
(All purchases must be accompanied by a credit card.)


 

 

Castello di Monsanto

Chianti Classico Riserva, 2013

  Tuscany, Italy

90% Sangiovese, 10% Canaiolo and Colorino

#58 Wine on Spectator's Top 100 of 2016!!

91 Points! Robert Parker's The Wine Advocate 

"With balanced and nicely-ripened fruit, the 2013 Chianti Classico Riserva comes as a beautiful surprise. This is a frank and upfront Tuscan red made from 90% Sangiovese and 10% Colorino and Canaiolo, aged in tonneaux and neutral barrique. The wine offers crisp lines and a linear style that gives prominence to aromas of crisp cherry, baking spice and toasted almond. This is a medium-bodied wine with polished tannins and a deep garnet-ruby color."

91 Points! The Wine Spectator 

"Pure cherry takes center stage, framed by tar, earth, tobacco and mineral elements. Vivid and elegant, showing fine intensity and equilibrium, with a lingering aftertaste. Drink now through 2020."

 

Our Thoughts...............


Ruby red tending towards garnet. Rich, intense and complex nose with notes of black cherry and spice. Full bodied with rich red berry fruit flavors complimenting a backbone of tannin.,  Well balanced, an exceptional compliment to red meats, roasts and big red sauces! 

 

Our Regular Price $32.99

Special Sale Price
Only 
$22.00 a bottle


$108.00 for six  ($18.00 a bottle!)

 

Call us at 703-668-WINE(9463) 

 

History of Castello di Monsanto …..

Aldo Bianchi, a native of San Gimignano, left Tuscany before the Second World War to seek fortune in the North of Italy. In 1960, he came back to the area for a wedding and was enchanted by the view from the terrace of Castello di Monsanto: all the Val d’Elsa with the inimitable backdrop of the Towers of San Gimignano. It was love at first sight which made him buy the property within a few months. But if Aldo was bewitched by the landscape, Fabrizio, his son, immediately fell in love with the wines he found in the cellar. Thanks to a passion for wine handed down to him by his grandmother, who came from Piedmont, and to an innate entrepreneurial spirit, Fabrizio, together with the untiring help of his wife Giuliana, started to plant new vineyards and convert the numerous farmhouses….and an incredible story of love, passion and joy for wine and everything concerned with it, starts from here.

In 1962, for the first time within the area of the Chianti Classico Denomination, Fabrizio vinified the grapes from the Il Poggio vineyard: the First Chianti Classico Cru was born.

In 1968, he decided to eliminate the white grapes from the Poggio blend (Trebbiano and Malvasia), a compulsory requirement for the Specifications : a clear and net message to try and make it understood that the real richness of this land, to which the maximum attention had to be given, had to be the Sangiovese.
In the same year, much ahead of his times, he also eliminated the grape-stalk fermentation and the use, very much followed then, of the “Governo alla Toscana” (a refermentation technique adding grapes harvested later) in order to produce a wine of major complexity and balance suitable for a long ageing.

Always the more convinced in the value of Sangiovese, in 1974, he created, from the Scanni vineyard, planted in 1968, the Fabrizio Bianchi Sangioveto – then labelled as Sangioveto Grosso – a table wine exclusively from Sangiovese grapes, which triggered off the enhancement of this vine in Tuscany.

In the meantime, innovations in the cellar did not fail to arrive : as long ago as the 70’s the use of fermenting steel containers started, substituting the wooden ones, where temperature control was much more difficult. In those same years, the use of chestnut barrels was substituted with those in Slavonia oak, with sweeter and less aggressive tannins.

1974 is also the year in which the experiments in the vineyards started in order to produce a white Tuscan wine worth the name of the company : the Valdigallo vineyard was planted which was to give life to the Fabrizio Bianchi Chardonnay after some years.

In 1981 the new cellar was ready and a few months later the first harvesting of Nemo arrived : a monovarietal Cabernet Sauvignon, from the Il Mulino vineyard.

In 1986, with great boldness and courage, works for the construction of an underground tunnel started. Mario Secci, Giotto Cicionesi and Romolo Bartalesi,  who had already worked in the company for many years, converting the farmhouses, took up the challenge : to hand-build 300 metres of an underground tunnel for the storing of wooden barrels, using only the marl stone coming from the ploughing of the vineyards, with the Medieval technique of arched wooden ribs to give shape to a very long and charming lowered Etruscan arch. In 1992, six years later, the work was completed and their spirit and strength still live in the energy of this masterpiece.

In 1989, Laura, Fabrizio’s daughter, started to work in the company and gradually learned from the land, the people who worked it and her father, the marvels and difficulties of the natural evolutive  process which transforms grapes into wine.

In 1996 another important innovation was brought to the cellar : the substitution of the traditional shape of the fermenting vats to a truncated cone one, in order to fully exploit the phenomenon of the convection of the liquids generated by their specific shape, obtaining the maximum extraction from the macerating peels using the “délèstage” system (emptying).

As from 2001, Laura and Fabrizio have been sided by the collaboration of a wine maker.  From this encounter with Andrea Giovannini, a strong relationship was born where the energies coming from each one become synergies for the company, all going in the same direction.

The continuous experiments, the maximum research for quality and the great attention to each and every detail of the production process, from the vineyard to the cellar, form the DNA of this company,