95pts Vinous
Drinking Window: 2028 – 2047
The 2022 Chiesamonti is stellar. Chiesamonti is often marked by slightly coarse tannins. In 2022, intense summer heat amplified the fruit, yielding an especially showy, racy edition of the Chiesamonti. Plush contours wrap around a core of dark red/purplish fruit, blood orange, rose petal, lavender and spice. Readers will have a hard time keeping their hands off this wine. And why should they? This is pure and total seduction. – ByAntonio GallonionJuly 2025

Giovanna Morganti and Giorgio Serao follow up their spectacular 2021s with a very serious set of 2022s. The Chiesamonti is especially fine. Severe dehydration on the vine required extreme sorting. Other than that, the wines are terrific. As a reminder, Chiesamonti is mostly Sangiovese with some Canaiolo fermented in 30HL uprights then aged for 18 months in 18HL and 6HL casks. The flagship Le Trame is 100% Sangiovese vinified in smaller, open-top uprights and aged entirely in cask. These remain some of the most pure, transparent wines readers will find anywhere in the world. Best of all, the 2022s drink well now, although I do advise some decanting to help soften the youthful contours.

Chiesamonti is a 1.3-hectare parcel adjacent to the town of San Felice in Castelnuovo Berardenga, with a stonier soil profile and a lower clay content than Giovannas home turf. The vines, now over a decade old, used to be blended into Cinque in their younger years, but she now feels they are ready for prime time, and this winebottled on its own for the first time in 2018provides a fascinating counterpoint to Le Trame: silkier, higher-toned, and overall prettier, with a more blatant mineral underpinning and less sumptuously fleshy fruit. It spends two years in Stockinger barrels, just like its sister wine, and it comprises nearly entirely Sangiovese, with just a touch of Canaiolo.

Grapes: Moslty Sangiovese (95%) or so, the rest Canaiolo
Farming: Practicing organic, with some biodynamic practices

Abv: 13%

Vineyard: From a .3 ha parcel on a gentle slope near Castelnuovo Baradenga of Alberese (Limestone-clay) soil. High-density Albarello training planted at 7,000 vines/ha in the late 1980s

Fermentation: Destemmed, the wine ferments spontaneously in open-top, neutral Slavonian and Austrian oak vats with only punch-downs during fermentation (no pumps)

levage: 24 months in neutral, 500-l barrels and Slavonian and Austrian oak tini. Unfined and unfiltered

Sulfur: Minimal, but plenty to keep things stable 40 mg/l total sulfur