2020 Masseto
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How full and heavy the wine feels in your mouth, like the difference between skimmed milk and cream. More alcohol, sugar and oak ageing make a wine fuller.
The drying, grippy feel on your gums and tongue, as with strong tea. It comes from the skins and seeds of black grapes and from oak, and softens with age.
How much sugar you taste, from dry to sweet. Fruity is not the same as sweet: a dry wine can taste of ripe fruit.
How fresh and juicy the wine is: acidity makes your mouth water. High acidity tastes lively and refreshing, low acidity soft and round.
This wine Your tasting note Click a taste for what it means
The bars follow how sommeliers taste (WSET): body, tannin, sweetness and acidity, each from low to high.
Body: powerful. Fuller than most red wines from ; 14% alcohol.
Tannin: firm. From ; aged in oak.
Sweetness: dry. Red wine from Super Tuscan is almost always dry.
Acidity: medium. from the warm climate of .
Aromas: dark fruit and red fruit, typical of
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The Supertuscan Ornellaia Masseto has developed beautifully in recent years with the evolution of oak and bottle aging. This is a highly distinctive edition of the Italian Merlot, resulting in a silky, streamlined wine. The Masseto is a (cult) wine of great class! The palate is full-bodied and elegant, with abundant red fruit, perfect tannins, and a perfectly long finish. The nose reveals aromas of red fruit, such as plums, jam, and hints of chocolate. This wine is ready to drink now, but will continue to develop in quality in the bottle over the coming years. A wine of great class! The palate is full-bodied and elegant, with abundant red fruit, perfect tannins, and a perfectly long finish. The nose reveals aromas of red fruit, such as plums, jam, and hints of chocolate.
This 2020 follows the 2019 vintage, with Cabernet Franc added to the predominant Merlot. The Masseto has two key themes at its core: concentration and elegance. And managing these two seemingly contrasting elements requires a bit of magic. That's the Masseto magic we're looking for. The Masseto delivers with wonderfully concentrated fruit, blackberry, integrated herbs, tobacco, crushed slate, pencil shavings, and plenty of texture for a lingering mouthfeel. Dark fruit and ripe blackberry blend gently into spice, leather, chocolate, and sweet tobacco. The wine exhibits generous extraction and concentration; however, it remains light and lifted throughout, and thus wonderfully balanced.
FACT: The Ornellaia Masseto is also a wine that is only distributed through the Place du Bordeaux, where we, as Grand Crus, can purchase directly. Be very wary of counterfeit bottles, which are much more common than the official Masseto, so always buy this iconic wine from an authorized wine merchant. In the "Tab: Attachment" you will find the official fact sheet for this fine wine. We will automatically send it to you when you order this wine. The wine is stored in our climate-controlled Wine Warehouse, and if you pick it up, you will also receive a nice discount. We are located almost next to the Rijksweg with ample parking. Click here for the address.
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The wine
- 100%
Origin
Bottle
Wine features
Parker
The Wine Advocate
RP 96+
Reviewed by:
Monica Larner
Release Price:
$800
Drink Date:
2026 - 2050
The 2020 Masseto now sees new DNA with a touch of Cabernet Franc added to this celebrated Merlot-based icon wine. This is a vintage of enormous richness and density, and everything about the wine is taken up a notch or two (including the bottle glass weight and the 15% alcohol content). But Axel Heinz and his team are well prepared for the hot vintages like 2020, and changes to farming and canopy management ensure even ripening. This wine is always hard to analyze in its youth. It needs many more years to soften and flesh out. Give it time.
Following a very productive 17 years at Masseto and Ornellaia, Estate Director Axel Heinz announced in March of this year that he was leaving his position. He will join Château Lascombes in Bordeaux as CEO. Axel was born in Germany, raised in France and established a brilliant winemaking career in Italy. "It makes it difficult to know which national soccer team to root for," he once joked with me. Under his time at Masseto and Ornellaia, the two brands grew in respective strength with individual identities. His new releases command some of the highest prices in Italian wine and are sought after by collectors worldwide. Axel oversaw the construction of the new Masseto winery, and he launched a second wine called Massetino (new vintages of both are reviewed here). Axel was quoted in the Italian press as saying, "Italy will stay in my heart forever, but it's time to go back to France."
I visited with Axel Heinz and the newly-appointed Masseto winemaker Gaia Cinnirella in early July to taste a preview sample of the 2020 Masseto and the 2020 Massetino that are hitting the market now. My review of the 15,000-bottle 2020 Massetino was published in May: https://www.robertparker.com/wines/TGgDqjsgpQZ4E4Rh2. Massetino was first produced in 2017, and this Merlot-based wine (with a small part Cabernet Franc) is already enjoying big success as the winery's "lower-entry" wine. The flagship remains Masseto (now in its 36th year). The iconic Merlot-based wine also has a small element of Cabernet Franc (from 6% to 7%) in the 2019 and the 2020 vintages. The decision to add the Cabernet Franc is part of a greater discussion on the impact of climate change in coastal Tuscan wines. Whether Cabernet Franc will be added to Masseto in the future will be decided on a vintage-by-vintage basis. The fact remains that Cabernet Franc performs very well in this specific environment. The estate had the opportunity to replant vines on blue clay soils that were previously used for the white wine Poggio alle Gazze dell'Ornellaia. They wanted to try a new variety. The scorching hot 2017 vintage caused further concern about warming summer temperatures, and Estate Director Axel Heinz was generally looking for a new approach with Masseto. Blending in the Cabernet Franc was a natural outcome, and Heinz cites inspiration from Pomerol and Saint-Émilion. After the classic 2019 vintage and the full-bodied 2020 vintage, comes the highly anticipated 2021 vintage. Heinz says, “The dry season concentrated the grapes, which yielded intense wines with great potential. The colors are particularly intense, like the aromas characterized by fully ripened black fruit. In the mouth, we find the unmistakable balance between richness and firmness that distinguishes Masseto. The wines develop a rich and concentrated palate, with dense and velvety tannins, as the result of careful and soft extraction, underpinned by striking acidity that is reminiscent of some of the best vintages, such as 2006, 2010 and 2016.”
Published: May 31, 2023
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James Suckling
MASSETO TOSCANA 2020
Monday, August 7, 2023
CountryItaly
RegionTuscany
Vintage2020
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Score
99
Intense aromas of ripe herbs, plums, green coffee beans, and hazelnuts. Turns to crushed berries and orange peel. Full-bodied with superb concentration and fine, velvety tannins that run the length of the wine. It's big but agile and gorgeous. Merlot. What a wine! Best after 2030.
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Vinous
98
Drinking Window
2027 - 2045
From: Exploring New Releases from Coastal Tuscany (Aug 2023)
The 2020 Masseto is superb. Bright and vibrant in the glass, the 2020 offers up an exciting mix of dark-toned fruit, mocha, spice, leather, tobacco, cedar and a kiss of French oak. Lively acids and Franc aromatics lend vibrancy throughout. The Franc is so evident today. This is exceptionally polished and sophisticated, albeit a touch slender relative to most years. In 2020, Masseto is more finesse than power.
- By Antonio Galloni on August 2023
There's quite a bit of news at Ornellaia and sister estate Masseto. Longtime Estate Manager Axel Heinz departed the wineries earlier this summer for his native Bordeaux, which opens a new chapter for both estates. “Two thousand-twenty was the last in a trio of vintages with more rain than usual and no drought, but quite a bit of heat during summer." Heinz explained. "Temperatures moderated in August, with the arrival of cool evenings. We picked quite a bit of Merlot early for the aromatics. Temperatures then rose markedly, leading to a week of rain, and then finally to good weather through to the end of harvest."
Masseto is a terrific example of the restrained style of 2020, while Massetino is an equally fine and representative 2021.
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Lodovico Antinori already had a head start at birth. The Antinoris have been among the Florentine merchant nobility for centuries and already joined the wine buyers' guild in 1385. Since then, there has always been one member of the family in the wine trade. The family estates in Tuscany were greatly expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries and the family gained a lot of experience in the winery. At the beginning of this century, she founded an influential trading company. Marquis Lodovico worked for a while in the family business, but decided to go his own way in the early 1980s. He created an extensive vineyard on Tenuta dell'Ornelllaia, a family estate in Bolgheri on the Mediterranean, 96 km from Florence.
This part of the Maremma not only has a beautiful wild nature, but is also a fertile agricultural area, a region with great potential for wine production. Lodovico's uncle, Marquis Incisa della Rochetta, had already drawn Bolgheri's attention to the wine world with his pioneering work on Tenuta San Guido and with his Sassiciaia, now regarded as one of the world's greatest red wines.
Lodovico Antinori followed in his uncle's footsteps in nearby Ornellaia, although he makes a completely different type of wine. He learned from a number of international wine authorities that the character of the Bolgheri soil resembled that of St.-Émilion and Pomerol in Bordeaux was ideal for the production of quality wine. The special feature of the Ornellaia vineyard - for Italian standards - is the high percentage of merlot. The assembly for Antinori's top wine, the red Ornellaia, contains 40% merlot. However, this grape comes into its own best at the vigna veccia (old vines) of the winery. Since 1987, this plot has supplied the raw material for a 100% Merlot cuvée called the Masseto. The grapes for this wine have been picked under a sunny September sky. After the long fermentation of 18-20 days, the wine is naturally transferred to tanks. After which a maturing process in new Barriques. The result is a wine with structure, very pure fruit and a beautiful balance.
De 2020 Masseto toont geconcentreerd donker fruit van pruim en bramen, gecombineerd met tonen van chocolade, tabak, ceder en een vleugje kruidigheid, afgewerkt met fluweelzachte tannines en frisse zuurgraad die elegantie en lengte geven. Daardoor vormt hij een perfecte partner voor rundvlees, lam, wild, stoofschotels en rijpe kazen: denk aan gegrilde ribeye of entrecote met een reductie van rode wijn, kruidige lamsrack met rozemarijn en knoflook, langzaam gegaarde hertenbouten of gestoofde sukadelapjes, en krachtige gerijpte kazen zoals pecorino of oude cheddar, waarbij hoge-heet grillen, kruidenkorsten, of langzaam braden en stoven de geconcentreerde smaken en de zijdezachte tannines extra goed tot hun recht laten komen.
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