Montalcino Geography, Climate & Nature

Montalcino sits high on a hill with a large territory below it, and the territory is the appellation.

The site

The walled town is at 567 metres — the highest of the five towns in this group — on a hill with long views in every direction. The municipality covers 310.31 km², which is very large for 5,563 people and is the point: those square kilometres are the Brunello zone, and the appellation stops at the commune boundary.

The appellation as geography

This is the unusual thing about Montalcino. Brunello di Montalcino can be made only within this one comune — the name is the place — so the map of the wine and the map of the municipality are the same map. Within it, the growing conditions vary a great deal: the northern slopes toward Siena are cooler and higher, the southern and eastern ground toward Castelnuovo dell'Abate is warmer and lower, and growers talk about those differences the way Burgundians talk about villages.

The valley and the mountain

South and west the land falls into the Val d'Orcia, UNESCO-inscribed in 2004 across 61,188 hectares of the provinces of Siena and Grosseto for a cultivated landscape that has been painted since the Renaissance. South-east rises Monte Amiata, the old volcano that dominates every long view from this side of Tuscany and shelters the comune from some of the weather.

The neighbours

Pienza is about half an hour east across the valley, Montepulciano about an hour, and Siena about forty minutes north.

What it means for a visitor

The town is compact but it is at the top of a hill and the streets slope. More importantly, the things worth seeing are spread across 310 km² of countryside — the cellars and Sant'Antimo especially — so this is a commune that genuinely needs a car, and therefore a plan about who drives.

Montalcino is at 567 metres, the highest of the five towns in this group, and that altitude is part of why the wine is what it is.

What each season does

• Winter is cold, with frost and occasional snow, and windier than the valley. The compensation is the view: on still mornings the fog fills the Val d'Orcia below and the town sits above it in sun, looking across the top of a cloud layer to Monte Amiata.
• Spring is changeable and wet early, then very good from May. A late frost after bud-break is the risk growers watch.
• Summer is hot and dry, with the altitude giving slightly cooler nights than the valley floor — which matters for Sangiovese, a late-ripening grape that needs the diurnal swing. There is little shade in the town and none on the slopes.
• Autumn is the harvest, in September and into October, and then the fog. Whether that late autumn stays dry decides the vintage, and because Brunello cannot be sold until the fifth year after harvest, a difficult September is not discovered and corrected the following season — it is sold four years later under a label that cannot hide it.

Why vintage talk is not small talk here

That last point is the local obsession and it is rational. With a five-year release cycle and more than two hundred producers, the weather of one autumn is still being discussed, priced and compared half a decade later. Asking a grower about a specific year is the most interesting question you can ask in this town.

Montalcino's 310.31 km² are large enough to hold real variety, and the comune is not the wall-to-wall vineyard its reputation suggests — the Brunello zone is the best-exposed fraction of it.

What is here

• Vineyard on the best slopes, and most of it planted since the 1960s, when eleven producers became more than two hundred. That recency matters ecologically: these are modern plantings, and the question of whether the rows are grassed or kept bare is a live management decision rather than inherited practice. An increasing number of estates here choose cover crops deliberately.
• Mediterranean woodland survives on the steeper and poorer ground, and there is a good deal of it in a commune this size: holm oak, downy oak, strawberry tree and broom scrub, with chestnut higher up. This is the habitat reservoir, and in a wine commune it is unusual to have this much of it.
• Olive groves occupy ground between the vines and the woodland, and function as a managed open-canopy habitat.
• The Orcia and Ombrone catchments carry riparian strips of willow, poplar and alder below the town, and the gullies and crete of the Val d'Orcia margin add bare, eroding clay faces with their own specialised flora.
• Monte Amiata, south-east, is the serious natural ground in this direction — an old volcano with extensive beech and chestnut forest at altitude, well outside the comune but within sight of it and the obvious destination if you want woodland rather than vines.

The honest framing

This is a cultivated landscape of outstanding commercial value, and the Val d'Orcia's UNESCO inscription in 2004 recognised that kind of ground as cultural rather than natural. The ecological interest in Montalcino is the unusually large woodland fraction and the connectivity between those fragments — better here than in most Italian wine communes.

A large commune with a lot of woodland as well as vineyard, which makes Montalcino better for wildlife than the other towns in this group.

Mammals

Wild boar are abundant and are a serious problem for the vineyards, hunted accordingly; they are the mammal you are most likely to meet at dusk where woodland meets vines, and they are not dangerous if left alone — a sow with young excepted. Roe deer and fallow deer use the woodland, and red deer occur on the higher ground toward Monte Amiata. Red fox, badger, stone marten, pine marten, crested porcupine and European hare are all present. The Italian wolf has recolonised much of this part of Tuscany and is occasionally recorded in the wooded hills; it is not something a visitor will see and not a hazard.

Birds

The combination of open vineyard, olive, woodland and the eroded crete on the valley margin makes for a long list. Common buzzard and kestrel are constant, short-toed snake eagle hunts the open slopes in summer, and honey buzzard passes on migration. In spring the hoopoe, European bee-eater and golden oriole arrive — all three far more often heard than seen. Nightingale sings from the scrub in May; little owl and tawny owl use the farm buildings and the olive groves; jay, green woodpecker and great spotted woodpecker work the oak woods.

From the Fortezza walls at first light you are level with birds working the slopes below, which is a genuinely good watching position and requires no walking.

At Sant'Antimo

The abbey standing alone in open fields is a classic old-masonry site: swifts and martins around the tower in summer, bats at dusk, and kestrels using it as a perch. Going at dusk for the building and staying for the wildlife is the best hour in the comune.

Where to look

The woodland edges and farm tracks at first light, the Fortezza walls for raptors over the slopes, and Sant'Antimo at dusk. Not the vineyard rows, which are private, worked and quiet.