Region & History

The Etruscans planted vines here when Rome was still a village on the Tiber. Their tomb chambers depict drinking feasts with shallow bowls, remnants of their terraces can still be found in the hills around Siena, and the Romans later adopted both — the cultivation and the taste for it. Wine was never new here.

The land was then shaped by a tenant system that lasted a thousand years: the mezzadria. The farmer got land and a house, the landlord half the harvest — vineyard, olive grove, grain and livestock all on the same farm. For good wine, this was poison. Anyone who has to hand over half their crop plants for quantity. Only when the system collapsed in the 1950s and farmers moved to the cities could estates begin to focus on quality instead of yield.

In between lies a recipe that made Tuscany's name — and nearly ruined it. Bettino Ricasoli, baron and Italy's second prime minister, wrote down his Chianti formula in 1872: mostly Sangiovese, some Canaiolo, plus white grapes for freshness. When this became law in 1967, red wine suddenly contained up to thirty percent white grapes — in a region that was just becoming famous for its reds. It backfired. The wine flowed through half of Europe in straw-wrapped bottles, thin and cheap, sold as Italian folklore.

The answer came from producers who gave up the official seal. Starting in 1968, individual estates bottled wines that, under the rules then in force, weren't supposed to exist at all: pure Sangiovese without the mandatory white grapes, or Cabernet from Bolgheri — sold as the most basic table wine, the lowest classification there is. The press called them Super Tuscans. They cost ten times as much as the officially recognized wines, and that settled the debate.

Today, Chianti Classico is once again what its name promises. White grapes are banned, the minimum Sangiovese content is eighty percent, and since 1984 it has carried Italy's highest classification. The black rooster on the bottle isn't a brand logo. It's the coat of arms of the region between Florence and Siena, and it's more than six hundred years old.