​Biondi Santi – no change allowed?

The general obsession with Biondi Santi, the legendary Montalcino estate credited with the birth of Brunello back in the nineteenth century, and widespread agonising over any possible stylistic changes – for the worse it was assumed – which ensued after Franco Biondi Santi’s death in 2013, is one of many signs that Italian wine has gone from a modernist into a post-modernist phase.

I witnessed this myself when I started to work with Italian wines back in the 1990s as a waiter...