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The Fortune That Came Too Late: Brunello and the Families Who Stayed

The Tamanti held some of the best vineyard land in Montalcino for more than two centuries, yet no winery bears their name. They sold their farms in the twenty years after the Second World War, just before Brunello made Montalcino land some of the most valuable in Italy. This is the story of the fortune they missed, and of the neighbours who stayed.

A town emptying

The Tamanti were not the only ones to leave. On today’s boundaries, the comune of Montalcino had the following populations at the census:

In thirty years the comune lost half its people. The old bargain of the mezzadria, by which a sharecropping family worked a landowner’s farm for half the harvest, was dying, and in 1964 a national law forbade any new sharecropping contract. Farms sold in these years went cheaply. One wine writer recalls that only a few decades ago Montalcino was “the poorest hilltop town in Tuscany”, where vineyards changed hands “for nothing”. From 1960 to 1980 the town’s mayor was Ilio Raffaelli, whose history of Montalcino between 1892 and 1914 is one of the sources of our family history.

The turn

The recovery came through the wine. Brunello di Montalcino became a DOC by decree of 28 March 1966. On 28 April 1967 twenty-five producers founded the Consorzio; about half of them bottled their own wine, some 12,500 cases between them. Their names read like a map of the Tamanti story:

No Tamanti signed. Ezio Rivella, who came to Montalcino in 1977 to build a great new estate, remembered that it was then “un paese povero”, a poor place, with land for sale and no market for Brunello. In 1978 the American Mariani family bought Poggio alle Mura and, within five years, four neighbouring estates, 2,830 hectares in all, to create Castello Banfi. That year Montalcino made about 800,000 bottles of Brunello. On 1 July 1980 a presidential decree made Brunello the first wine in Italy to be granted the DOCG, the highest rank in Italian wine law. A younger sister wine followed: Rosso di Montalcino, made from the same Sangiovese but released sooner. It was recognized by decree of 25 November 1983 and has been made as a DOC from the 1984 harvest (Consorzio, Vini).

What the land is worth now

Today the Consorzio counts about 2,100 hectares of Brunello vineyards within a territory of 31,200 hectares, and more than two hundred members; in 2021 they sold a record 11.4 million bottles. The price of the land tells the rest of the story:

In 1820 Gaetano Tamanti alone held about 270 hectares. In 1957 Giuseppe Cencioni bought Dr. Antonio Tamanti’s old Capanna farm, twenty-five hectares of woods and fields, “with considerable sacrifice”, and was bottling Brunello seven years later. Read the Capanna story.

A shadow over the name

Wealth brought its own trials. In 2008 the Siena prosecutors investigated whether wines sold as Brunello, which by law must be made entirely from Sangiovese, contained other grapes. Millions of litres were seized and more than a million declassified. In 2009 seventeen people were charged, and most of them settled with a plea bargain. The scandal, soon called “Brunellogate”, showed how much a single word on a label had come to be worth. At the Consorzio’s fiftieth anniversary in 2017, Giuliana Tamanti’s daughter, Francesca Colombini Cinelli, summed up the half-century in one line: “Il Brunello è come il tweed: non siamo mai stati di moda, ma sempre un grande classico”. Brunello is like tweed: never in fashion, but always a great classic.

The great bottles

At the heart of the legend are a few bottles in the cellar of Il Greppo, the Biondi Santi villa where Maria Tamanti died in October 1864. Among them are the Riservas of 1888 and 1891, the vintages Franco Biondi Santi held up as the measure of all that followed. According to the estate, the 1888 was topped up in 1927, 1970 and 1985. The historic bottles rest without labels, their corks sealed with beeswax, until they leave the cellar. The 1891 was last opened in 2009, 118 years after its harvest, for the sixtieth wedding anniversary of Franco Biondi Santi and his wife Maria Floria. According to WineNews, the 1955 Riserva is the only Italian wine that Wine Spectator ranked among the twelve greatest wines of the twentieth century. In December 2016 the Biondi Santi family sold a majority of the estate to the French group EPI and kept a minority share; the descendants of Maria Tamanti no longer control the house her grandson made famous. Read Maria Tamanti’s story.

The families who stayed

Several of the families who sat beside the Tamanti on Montalcino’s councils, committees and cooperatives are still on their land. Their stories show, by contrast, what the Tamanti lost.

The Costanti. The family says it came to Montalcino in April 1555 among the 242 noble families who left Siena with the Republic, and stayed after 1559. At the wine exhibition of the provinces of Siena and Grosseto, held at Siena in the Carnival of 1870, Tito Costanti showed a wine of 1865 already called “Brunello”; according to the Consorzio’s reading of the original records, Clemente Santi, Maria Tamanti’s husband, entered a Brunello of 1865 at the same show. Emilio Costanti took up bottling again in the 1960s, and the estate, Colle al Matrichese, is run today by his great-nephew.

The Padelletti. The Padelletti date their care of Montalcino land to 1571 and are now in their twenty-seventh generation, on about six hectares. Carlo Padelletti stood beside Giuseppe Tamanti for thirty years. The two poured “exquisite wines from their estates” for the Sienese visitors of 1909. Carlo was Giuseppe’s partner in the olive mill of 1930, and the two received the wine commission of 1932 together.

The Colombini of Barbi. The Colombini have held land in Montalcino since 1352, and the Fattoria dei Barbi since the late eighteenth century. By the estate’s own account it was the first to export Brunello to Europe, America and Asia. Giuliana Tamanti’s husband, Giovanni Colombini (1906–1976), is remembered by the estate as the first in Italy to sell wine by mail order, in 1931, and the first in the district to open his cellar to the public, in 1949. Through Giuliana, Tamanti blood runs in two estates run by her grandchildren: Fattoria dei Barbi and Casato Prime Donne. Donatella Cinelli Colombini inherited Casato Prime Donne in 1998 and set out to run it with an all-female team. In 1993 she had invented Cantine Aperte, the open-cellar day that now brings visitors into wineries across Italy. Read the Colombini connection.

The family’s own recollections give this branch a human scale:

Staying cost something too. Stefano Cinelli Colombini has written that the family financed the farm’s transformation with mortgages and by selling houses in Florence, paintings, furniture and an old library. When Francesca died in December 2022, her funeral was held at the Madonna del Soccorso, the church of the 1699 Tamanti altar.

The Lisini. The Lisini have owned land in Montalcino since the sixteenth century. They planted their first vines in the 1930s and were among the founders of the Consorzio in 1967. In 1970 Elina Lisini became the only woman ever to serve as its president. When sharecropping ended, her nephew recalls, the choice was to sell or to invest, and she chose to invest.

The Martini of Il Paradiso. Not every family that stayed was a landed one. Before the war Manfredi Martini was Tancredi Biondi Santi’s cellarman at the Cantina Sociale, the cooperative to which the Tamanti sent their grapes. In the 1950s he and his wife Fortunata bought a small olive farm, Il Paradiso. When the great freeze of February 1956 killed the trees, Manfredi turned to vines, and in 1967 he too signed the founding act of the Consorzio. Their daughter Rosella remembered him asking her, as a small girl in the cellar, which wine she liked best, then sealing it with wax and putting it aside so they could discover together, years later, what it had become.

What made the difference

The Tamanti started out as well placed as any of these families: they were already doctors, hospital rectors and gonfalonieri in the seventeenth century. What the families who stayed had was someone on the land when the moment came, and a name on the bottle. The Tamanti had lost two sons in the wars, had a lawyer living at Arezzo and an engineer’s orphans raised in Rome, and left heirs who sold just before the turn. Their wine went into the cooperative under another family’s name, and their land into other families’ labels. Only through their daughters, Maria in 1819 and Giuliana in 1930, did the Tamanti reach the bottle at all. See the Brunello estates on former Tamanti land.

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