2018 Livio Sassetti Pertimali Mulino Brunello di Montalcino 750 ml

The Sassetti family has farmed some of Montalcino’s finest vineyards for more than a century, a longevity that’s given them an intimacy with the land that few of their peers can match. Four generations deep, they were there at the very founding of the Brunello Consorzio in 1967—Livio Sassetti was among the 25 producers who helped write the rules that govern Brunello to this day. It’s a resolutely traditional estate, and it possesses a unique clone of Brunello planted nowhere else in the world, the family having selected and preserved their most treasured vines across generations.

Their vineyards sit on the hill of Montosoli, which Forbes called Montalcino’s “Grand Cru”—the northern sector of the appellation, where marl and siliceous limestone soils over Galestro bedrock deliver wines of remarkable freshness, precision, and complexity. Vinous put it plainly: Sassetti’s wines are “some of the sleekest and purest of Montalcino.” The Montosoli terroir is, quite simply, where Brunello reaches its most classical and complete expression.

The Mulino parcel sits at the lower edge of those holdings, and it shows differently. The soils here are richer in fossil sediment—ancient marine shells so numerous and so large you can spot them walking between the rows—giving the wine a deeper mineral pull and a distinctive savory depth that sets it apart from even the estate’s celebrated flagship. Lorenzo Sassetti only began making this wine in 2015, and it represents the fullest, most site-specific expression of what Pertimali’s land is capable of.

Lorenzo ferments the Mulino in stainless steel before moving it to large, old Slavonian oak botti for three-plus years of patient aging. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is forced. The result is a Brunello that could only come from this specific piece of ground.

Over the years, Pertimali’s complexity and intensity have enthralled Wine Access members to no end. One called a past vintage “honestly the best Brunello I have ever had.” Others hailed it as “awesome” and “absolutely stunning.” Robert Parker declared, “If I had only one Brunello to drink, it would be Pertimali”—and the Mulino is the wine that goes even further than that benchmark.