The fortress hill town above Brunello country — Tuscany's best wine with a medieval skyline
Montalcino is a fortified medieval hill town in Siena province, Tuscany, perched at 564 metres above a sea of vineyards producing Brunello di Montalcino — the most prestigious (and expensive) Italian red wine, aged a minimum of five years before release. The 14th-century Rocca (fortress) still dominates the town, the historic centre is an intact medieval street plan of wine shops, enotecas, and stone palazzos, and the Val d'Orcia landscape surrounding it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Montalcino has fewer than 6,000 inhabitants and the town feels genuinely Italian rather than tourism-reface…
Montalcino's independence (it was the last stronghold of the Sienese Republic after Siena fell to Florence in 1555 — the Republic in Exile held out here for four years) gives it an unusually fierce identity for a small Tuscan town. The Brunello wine tradition dates to 1888 when Ferruccio Biondi Santi first isolated the Brunello clone of Sangiovese and aged it long enough to produce the style now recognized as DOCG. The fortress (1361) was built by the Sienese to defend the southern approach to Siena, and the enoteca inside it sells Brunello by the glass with medieval views.