Region: Suvereto, Tuscany, Italy

Varietal: 45% Sangiovese, 35% Montepulciano, 15% Alicante and 5% Marselan

Tasting notes: The 2019 Eneo is a wine of notable focus and drive. Black cherry, leather, tobacco, incense, smoke, dried herbs and gravel infuse the 2019 with striking layers of complexity. Firm but well-integrated tannins give the wine energy as well as proportion. There's a ton to like. This is an especially dark, at times somber, vintage of Eneo.

Producer: When Fabio Chiarelotto, a trained historian, purchased the Montepeloso estate in 1998, it was already well on its way to international stardom. While Chiarelotto could have rested on that reputation, he understood the estate was only beginning to reach its full potential. The winery draws from hillside vineyards around the town of Suvereto, just a few miles inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The region’s petrified clay soils, and its temperate, Mediterranean climate, give startling intensity of flavor to its wines. It’s little wonder that a half-dozen estates have sprung up there over the past 20 years. Isolated from Central Tuscany by the Colline Metallifere, Suvereto shares just as much with France’s Provence as it does with Central Tuscany. The local vegetation is called macchia, a blend of evergreen shrubs and herbs very similar to Provence’s garrigue, and it lends an undeniable Mediterranean character to Montepeloso’s finished wines.

Vineyard and Winemaking: Tucked away in the hills of Suvereto near Bolgheri on the Tuscan Coast – one of the hottest areas in Tuscany – is the 15-acre Montepeloso estate. The winemaker, Fabio Chiarelotto, admits about his wine that it’s “easy to produce concentrated wines in such a hot climate…but it’s much harder to achieve elegance and finesse.” In order to take full advantage of the terroir’s potential, he overhauled the vineyards in 1997 – retraining, pruning, and even regrafting many vines. In the cellar, he does relatively short macerations, employs natural yeasts during fermentation, and bottles without filtration. The fruit is manually harvested using small baskets. Grapes are 100% destemmed. The wine macerates for 14-22 days. Fermentation occurs in 1,500-liter and 3,000-liter steel tanks. The wine ages for 18 months in second and third passage French barrels and another 18 months in bottle before release. Malolactic fermentation occurs in French oak barrels. It is not filtered.