To impress during gifting season, splurge on this high-quality Brunello

If you’re aiming to impress a red wine lover, it’s hard to beat a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. Wines from high-status appellations, such as Napa Valley in California or Champagne in France, are frequently chosen as gifts due their rarity and cachet. In Italy, one such “blue-chip” wine is Brunello di Montalcino, widely considered to rank among the world’s top wines. As a rule, this column features wines chosen for their affordability, but we make an exception once a year to recommend a higher-end wine suitable for the gifting season, like this Tuscan beauty.

Italy’s number one grape is Sangiovese, a variety that dominates Tuscany’s wildly popular “rossos”, or red wines. Whether they’re labeled as Chianti or Toscana, most Tuscan red wines are Sangiovese-based blends: midweight, bone dry wines that are quite tart, tannic, and earthy, with high-pitched flavors of sour red cherries. However, sangiovese’s tendency to brown quickly leads vintners to blend in darker grapes to tint the wine a deeper color and extend its shelf life. Montalcino is a hilltop town near Siena that grows its own distinctive small-berried variant, a “clone” of Sangiovese known as Brunello whose wines are unusually high in the antioxidant compounds needed for making premium, age-worthy wines. Since the scenic town has long been wealthier than its neighbors, and since its rolling slopes are ideally suited to high-quality grape growing, brunello wines from Montalcino have earned a reputation for excellence and are now tightly regulated. Only the Brunello grapes can be used, with no blending, and the wines must undergo a lengthy period of aging in oak barrels. The resulting refinement shows in this wine’s concentration and the length of its finish, adding nuanced aromatic layers of vanilla and pipe tobacco to savory base flavors of cherry preserves and dried cranberries.

$69.99; 15% alcohol

PLCB Item # 9266

Sale price through Jan. 1 — regularly $74.99

Also available at these New Jersey stores:

Benash Liquors & Wines in Cherry Hill, $62.99, www.benashliquors.com; Williamstown Super Buy Rite in Williamstown, $62.99, www.williamstownbuyrite.com; Joe Canal’s in Lawrenceville, $65.99, lawrenceville.jcanals.com.