Through his remarkable vision and ambition, founder Sergio Manetti established Montevertine as one of the greatest estates in all of Italy, setting a towering new benchmark for quality in Chianti. Notably, he did so, not through technological enhancements or the imposition of outside varieties and cellar practices, but by harnessing the nobility of the autochthonous Sangiovese and striving for its purest possible expression. The release of a special bottling is a rarity at Montevertine; their most basic offering (the beloved Pian del Ciampolo) already bests many an estate’s top wine, and when no less an authority than Antonio Galloni declares your Le Pergole Torte “one of the world’s elite wines,” it leaves little room to scale upward. Thus, we are overjoyed to present “Il Duemilaventuno di Sergio Manetti” (“Sergio Manetti’s 2021”), a bottling of just 1,000 magnums celebrating 100 years since the founder’s birth and coinciding with a truly spectacular vintage in the region. Produced from the original vines of Le Pergole Torte planted the late 1960s and complemented by a small amount of Montevertine’s best fruit, “Il Duemilaventuno di Sergio Manetti” spent two full years in a single 16-hectoliter barrel—a 12-year-old Slavonian cask that Martino Manetti considers one of the estate’s best. While offering at this youthful stage only a glimpse of treasures still to be unveiled, this is nonetheless pulse-quickeningly layered and complex: a dramatic unfurling of saturated black cherries, blackberries, smoke-tinged church spices, subtly sanguine minerality, and that tangy, precise, cohesive acidity so characteristic of the estate’s style, all undergirded by honest but perfectly rendered tannins. What ravishes most about this bottling, however, is not its intensity but its purity; here we find the very DNA of Montevertine presented with breathtaking frankness, culminating in a wine that feels unscultped, unauthored, and utterly elemental. Following in Le Pergole Torte’s footsteps, the label for “Il Duemilaventuno di Sergio Manetti” comes from a private sketchbook of the late Alberto Manfredi, the local artist behind every Le Pergole Torte label and a close friend of Sergio’s.