2016 San Felice Chianti Classico

WineAlign

• By Sara d'Amato
  12/5/2019, (See more on WineAlign...)

  (San Felice Chianti Classico red) Login and sign up and see review text.

• By Antonio Galloni
  Chianti Classico 2015 & 2016: Right Place, Right Time (Feb 2019), 2/1/2019, (See more on Vinous...)

  (San Felice Chianti Classico Red) Login and sign up and see review text.

JamesSuckling.com

• By James Suckling
  6/30/2018, (See more on JamesSuckling.com...)

  (San Felice Chianti Classico, Red, Italy) Login and sign up and see review text.

WineAlign

• By David Lawrason
  6/3/2018, (See more on WineAlign...)

  (San Felice Chianti Classico, Docg red) Login and sign up and see review text.

• By Michael Godel
  5/14/2018, (See more on WineAlign...)

  (San Felice Chianti Classico, Docg red) Login and sign up and see review text.

Decanter

• By Michaela Morris
  Chianti Classico 2016, 2/12/2018, (See more on Decanter...)

  (San Felice, Chianti, Classico, Tuscany, Italy, Red) Login and subscribe to see review text.

JancisRobinson.com

• By Walter Speller
  2/12/2018, (See more on JancisRobinson.com...)

  (San Felice Chianti Classico Red) Subscribe to see review text.

Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Return of the Lidless Eye, 12/3/2018

  (San Felice Chianti Classico) Hello friends. After a multi-year dry spell, we’re back with our second Sauron wine in six weeks. In case you’ve forgotten what that means, these are outstanding wines with long delays between tasting and availability; wines requiring the full attention of Full Pull’s great lidless eye. Today’s wine will be familiar to long-time list members, but the rest of the world is rapidly catching on, after an eye-popping review for the new vintage.Wine Spectator: Copyrighted material withheld. Quick context note on that review: Wine Spectator has been reviewing San Felice’s Classico since the 1990 vintage, and this is the highest score/strongest review the wine has ever earned. And the previous high was 91pts, so it isn’t even close. This review is also yet another data point in the argument that 2015-2016 were a pair of truly special back-to-back vintages across much of Europe. I was similarly smitten when we tasted this wine back over the summer. It just had crazy fruit impact and structure for that price point; I can totally see why Sanderson went with a drinking window through 2036. But at that point, there was not enough wine in-country for an offer. I knew more containers were being filled in Italy, so we penciled this in for a late-autumn/early-winter offer, after those cans arrived. Of course, in the meantime, that Spectator review came out, making the situation considerably more competitive. And then, last week, to the surprise of no one, the wine landed on Spectator’s year-end Top 100, in the #19 slot. It is the least expensive wine in the top 20 by about ten bucks; the other 19 wines range from $26 to $245, with an average price of $85. All this to say: there is *enormous* sales pressure on this wine. It makes me wonder whether our lidless eye is the only one trained on the Port of Seattle currently. Speaking of the port, here’s my current intel: the container ship should dock this Thursday (Dec 6). If that happens, and if all goes well with customs clearances, the wine should hit the importer warehouse one week from today – Dec 10 – and could conceivably be delivered Tuesday Dec 11 and be available for pickup as early as Thursday Dec 13. That takes a lot of things going right, and I’d put the odds at 40/60. The odds are more like 90/10 that the wine will be available for our last open weekend of the year (Dec 20-22), and then of course there’s always a small chance that something gets hung up and the wine won’t be available until January. But that’s unlikely based on what I’m hearing. That timeline should give our list members just shy of a week to place orders (please try to submit requests by Sunday evening), and I will proceed to advocate as forcefully as we can for as much wine as we can. I’m certain others will catch wind of this wine’s arrival quickly (perhaps right at this very moment), but my hope is another smash-and-grab job: that we get in and out before anyone realizes we were there. Now then, the wine itself. As we approach the end of another year, I continue to be thrilled with the way our list members have embraced Chianti over the past few years. It is a terrific value-hunter’s category, but it requires legwork, a lot of frog-kissing to find the princes. And that’s the Full Pull model: we kiss the frogs so you don’t have to. Chianti’s fortunes are improving in the US market, but it’s still walking the line between fashionable and unfashionable, still burdened by the days of swill-in-straw-baskets. No matter. We know better. Fashion or no, we know that Chianti remains one of the world’s beating hearts of Sangiovese, and that the good bottles are really, really good. As our list members have discovered over the past few years, San Felice is really, really good. The winery sits in the commune of Castelnuovo Berardenga, at an altitude of about 1300ft. Their grounds encompass 650 hectares of grapes, 17,000 olive trees (!), and an agritourismo (!!). Their Chianti Classico is classic indeed, a blend of 80% Sangiovese and 10% each Colorino and Pugnitello from the calcareous marl soils of Castelnuovo Berardenga in the foothills outside of Siena, aged for a year in large Slavonian oak botti. The ’16 clocks in at 13% listed alc and drinks more like a Gran Selezione than a humble Classico. As I mentioned above, there is terrific fruit impact and intensity, with the usual red cherry-fruited Sangiovese paired to attractive earth and leaf and flower notes galore. The structure is outrageous. Yes, the usual blood-orange acidity inherent to Sangio, but also in this vintage no shortage of robust, toothsome tannin. Again, not the rustic taverna-wine tannins we’re used to in Classico; instead the polished fine-grained tannins we expect from Tuscany’s best $40 and $50 Sangioveses. This is classy juice in a humble package; certainly the finest San Felice Chianto Classico we’ve offered; perhaps the finest Classico we’ve offered period?