Mate Brunello di Montalcino 2016

Ferenc Máté fled Hungary as a boy after the 1956 revolution, grew up in Vancouver, and became a sailor and author; he and his wife Candace, a painter, left New York for Tuscany in 1990, a move he chronicled in The Hills of Tuscany. They restored an abandoned friary, planted vines between 1997 and 1999, and their estate now farms six and a half hectares of organic Sangiovese in the Santa Restituta zone near Sant'Angelo in Colle, the temperate, seaward corner of the appellation, at roughly 300 to 400 meters on calcareous marls and sandstones. Aging runs in French oak from 500 to 4,000 liters, splitting the difference between barrique and botte. The house style is generous: ripe cherry and berry fruit over structured tannins, with a mineral undercurrent from those chalky soils. From the outstanding 2016 vintage, proof that Montalcino rewards its adopted romantics.