This is a wine of impressive magnitude and depth. The Siro Pacenti 2016 Brunello di Montalcino Riserva PS is modern, bold, powerful and built like a brick wall. It delivers ample concentration and texture richness, but it also boasts a pretty dark ruby color that is quite beautiful in the glass. This is a healthy, vibrant wine with plenty of aromatic character. There are fruit and oak tannins (both firmly in place to guide the wine over long cellar aging), and it sits squarely over the palate, imparting creaminess and structure. Give it ample time to soften and unfold. With time (I came back to the bottle 24 and 48 hours after opening it), it shows delicate hues of mountain herb, mint and violets. Made in limited numbers, there are only 650 bottles of this vintage plus some larger formats.

Having tasted this wine in a preview capacity a few years back, it's exciting to compare my past impressions to the current ones. In the case of the Siro Pacenti 2015 Brunello di Montalcino Riserva PS, I found that the oak signature was very strong back then and that it remains very strong, even too strong today. There's beauty here, no doubt, but the stylistic preference for 100% new oak on Sangiovese is forever controversial and debatable. I find that it no longer jibes with my palate, although from an intellectual point of view it’s impossible not to recognize the craftsmanship. The aging protocol is set forth by a gradually increasing grain and toast regimen with custom barrels ordered from tonnellerie Taransaud. The wine is aged in new oak for two years and racked every three months for the first year of aging. Detail-oriented farming translates into an impressive 600 to 700 hours of manual work per hectare. The wine's appearance is almost impenetrable, and the bouquet is well-integrated with black fruit, spice and balsam notes, but those tannins are just too much. This wine was not produced in 2013 or 2014, and this 2015 release counts 1,000 bottles and 200 magnums. In 2013, all the fruit went to the Brunello Vecchie Vigne instead. My big-picture takeaway is that I'd like to see more Sangiovese purity, but hats-off to the impeccable winemaking.

The 2012 Brunello di Montalcino Riserva PS is absolutely impressive, but with only 4,500 bottles made, it may not prove easy to locate. This precious expression of Sangiovese exhibits a gorgeous level of intensity and power, coupled by elegance and poise. The long presentation of aromas starts with black fruit and cherry confit and continues to crushed stone, toasted spice, cola and medicinal herb. The wine's texture sticks firmly to the palate. This Brunello ages in French oak for two years.