Montefalco Sagrantino Vintage Guide: Every Year From 1975 to 2022

Buy 2020. It is the highest-rated Montefalco Sagrantino ever recorded, and it will not be ready for a while yet.

The Consorzio Tutela Vini Montefalco has been rating its own harvests since 1975, and the full record is the most useful document nobody outside Italy reads. Forty-eight vintages. Five stars awarded nine times. One star awarded once.

Here it is, with what I would actually do with each year.

The last decade, in detail

Scores out of 100 have only been published since 2017. Before that it is stars alone.

The five-star years, all of them

Nine in forty-eight. That is the whole list:

Sagrantino has the tannin and acid to survive those spans, which is exactly why the chart goes back fifty years at all. Most appellations would not bother.

Three of these years, on a shelf right now

Prices checked 31 August 2026.

That last row is the chart doing its job. Còlpetrone's 2017 is the cheapest Montefalco Sagrantino you will find in America, and the reason is sitting in the table above: it came from the weakest recent harvest. That is not an argument against buying it. It is an argument for drinking it this year rather than putting it away, and for knowing what you paid for.

The 2016 at $104.99 is the opposite trade. Ten years old, five stars, at Bartoloni's maturity mark.

And if you want the strangest thing Montefalco makes, Paolo Bea's Sagrantino Passito 2011 is $129.99 for a half bottle. Dried on racks, sweet, and still tannic enough to finish dry.

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The years to be careful with

1992 is the only one-star vintage in the entire record. Eight more scored two: 2002, 1989, 1986, 1984, 1982, 1978, 1976 and 1975.

You will rarely meet these. But if a shop is clearing old Umbrian stock and the price looks generous, check the year before you congratulate yourself.

How to read a rating written by the people who made the wine

This chart is published by the appellation's own trade body. That is not a reason to dismiss it and it is not a reason to take it at face value either.

What it is good for: the shape of a decade. A body that rates its own 2017 at three stars and 88 points, in public, permanently, is not simply marketing. The two- and one-star years are the tell. Nobody invents a bad harvest.

What it is not good for: comparing Montefalco to anywhere else. These stars mean something inside Umbria and nothing outside it. A four-star Sagrantino and a four-star anything else are not the same claim.

What the ratings do not tell you

They rate the harvest, not the producer. A five-star year from a careless cellar will lose to a three-star year from a good one, and in an appellation of 65 member wineries that spread is wide.

They also cannot tell you how a bottle was stored between Umbria and your shelf, which for a twenty-year-old wine matters more than the weather in the year it was picked.

My honest limitation

I have not drunk a vertical of Sagrantino, and I am not going to pretend a chart is the same as a memory of the wine.

Everything above is the Consorzio's data plus my reading of it against their president's advice on ageing. Where the number is theirs, I have said so. Where the drinking window is my judgement, that is what it is: a judgement, from the ratings and from the ten-year maturity mark Paolo Bartoloni gave me, not from a glass in my hand.

If you own any of these years, I would rather hear from you than guess.

Where this sits

Sagrantino belongs to the same structural family as Barolo's Nebbiolo, and the ageing question is the same question. High acid, firm tannin, decades of patience rewarded.

The difference is that a great Barolo vintage is priced like one. A great Sagrantino vintage mostly is not, because the chart above has never been translated into a market.

Sagrantino is on the Underdog 101 ballot. Vote for it and its guide gets deepened first.

Vintage ratings and scores: Consorzio Tutela Vini Montefalco, retrieved 31 August 2026.