For a great wine, Brunello di Montalcino has had more than its share of detractors. People I know and respect have derided the wines as too big, or not sufficiently reflective of terroir, or overly manipulated to fit critical fashions.

No doubt you can point to examples to support each criticism, as you can with blanket condemnations of any major wine region.

But assaults on Brunello di Montalcino, some of the most intense from within the region itself, have struck to the very core of its identity as a wine made of a single grape, sangiovese. It was not so many years ago that Brunello producers debated permitting other grapes to be blended in, a disastrous redefinition that was narrowly averted.

I believe that the best examples of Brunello di Montalcino are among the world’s greatest wines, a belief that was made even stronger by a recent tasting of some old vintages of Biondi-Santi, perhaps the greatest of all Brunello producers, but one whose style was roundly assailed in the 1990s and the first decade of this century.