Tuscany

Where the wine law is older than the country

Italy became a country in 1861. Tuscany had been drawing legal boundaries around its vineyards since 1716, when Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici named four zones: Chianti, Pomino, Val d’Arno di Sopra and Carmignano.

Chianti became the most recognised of the four, and there is far too much to say about it for a few paragraphs here, so it will have a piece of its own. This one follows the rest, the other three zones, the coast, the islands, and a few corners where the rules turn out to be older, or stranger, than they look.

Carmignano

Carmignano sits on the Montalbano hills, sixteen kilometres north west of Florence, and covers about 110 hectares, the size of one substantial estate in Bolgheri.

It has been blending Cabernet into Sangiovese since at least the 1600s.

This is worth pausing on, because the same combination was treated as an act of rebellion in the 1970s. When producers on the coast began putting Bordeaux varieties into Tuscan reds, no appellation would have them, and the wines went out labelled as basic table wine. That is where the Super Tuscans come from. The story is usually told as tradition versus modernity.

Carmignano rather complicates it. The blend there is not tolerated but compulsory: the DOCG requires between 10 and 20 % Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc in every bottle. The older growers call it uva francesca, the French grape, and tradition credits Catherine de’ Medici with bringing it home in the sixteenth century. Tuscans credit Catherine with a good deal. The list grows with the teller and I have never heard it shorten.

So the wines described in the 1970s as a break with Tuscan tradition had been Tuscan tradition, twenty minutes from Florence, for roughly four hundred years.

Carmignano also became, in 1975, the first appellation in modern Italian law to permit Cabernet Sauvignon in a blend, three years before Sassicaia won the tasting that made the Super Tuscans famous. There is no evidence anyone consulted them about it.

Which is, in fairness, the risk of getting somewhere first. You are not the story. You are the thing the story was supposed to be surprising about.

Bolgheri, and a category of one

Four hundred years after Carmignano, and about eighty kilometres west, the same idea arrived on the coast.

Bolgheri is in the Upper Maremma, and until the 1930s it was marshland, malarial, thinly populated, drained only under the reclamation schemes that were finished across the wider Maremma after the war. Before that it grew peaches, almonds, potatoes and some undistinguished wine. Mario Incisa della Rocchetta arrived in the early 1940s, having married into the Della Gherardesca family, and planted Cabernet Sauvignon in ground so stony he named the vineyard Sassicaia, the place of many stones. He made wine there for his family and friends for two decades without selling a bottle.

The 1968 vintage was the first to reach the market, in the early seventies. In 1978 it came first among Cabernets from around the world at a Decanter blind tasting. The winemaker was Giacomo Tachis, who would spend his final decades working in Sardinia.

Because no Tuscan appellation permitted the blend, Sassicaia went out as vino da tavola, table wine, the lowest category the law provided. Tignanello did the same. Buyers then paid more for the table wine than for wines carrying the highest classification in the country, which is about as direct a verdict on a classification system as it is possible to deliver.

The law eventually caught up. Sassicaia now has an appellation of its own: Bolgheri Sassicaia, the only DOC in Italy covering a single wine from a single estate. Italy spent a century building a system that identifies wine by place rather than by producer, and then drew a place around one vineyard.

The wider Bolgheri DOC is nearly as unusual. Its red wines may be made entirely from Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc, with Sangiovese permitted but capped, a Tuscan appellation in which the Tuscan grape is optional.

Just up the coast, the Suvereto DOCG requires the wine to be entirely Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Italy’s highest classification, awarded to a Tuscan wine with no Italian grape in it. I have asked several people whether this is a triumph or a surrender and have never had the same answer twice.

The first DOC in Italy went to a white

Not Chianti. Not Barolo. Vernaccia di San Gimignano, in March 1966, ahead of everything.

It remains Tuscany’s only white DOCG, which in a region this red is a fact I enjoy more than is strictly reasonable.

Vernaccia appears in San Gimignano’s municipal archives in 1276, its paperwork is older than most European countries. Dante puts it in the Purgatorio. The town grew rich on two things, saffron and this wine, which between them paid for the towers people now queue to photograph.

Like a great many Italian whites it went through a long stretch of being made for volume, and like a great many Italian whites it has spent thirty years climbing back.

Ansonica

Ansonica is the same grape variety Sicily calls Inzolia, where much of it goes into Marsala. In Tuscany it does something entirely different, which is a useful reminder that grapes have no fixed personality, only the one the place gives them.

It grows along the coast and, more interestingly, on the islands. Elba has a DOC for Ansonica and a second DOC for the passito made from it. Two appellations for one grape, on an island with two hundred and fifty hectares of vineyard in total.

On the mainland there is Ansonica Costa dell’Argentario DOC, covering Monte Argentario and the island of Giglio. Giglio’s vines sit on dry stone terraces at angles that would trouble a goat, and almost none of the wine leaves the island. This is not scarcity marketing. There simply isn’t much of it.

The wine is saline, low in acidity, faintly waxy, and tastes of somewhere with a great deal of sea and very little soil.

Remember the name. It comes back shortly, in the least likely vineyard in Italy.

 

Elba

The Romans called Elba insula vinifera, the wine bearing island, which suggests they gave it more thought than we do.

Around 1810 the island carried over five thousand hectares of vines and the local economy essentially ran on them. In 1814 Napoleon was exiled there, which means that for roughly ten months the most feared man in Europe was confined to one of the better vineyards in the Mediterranean. He escaped anyway. Nobody has ever quite explained this.

Elba today has about two hundred and fifty hectares.

Phylloxera took the first cut and the wars took more, but the decisive change was tourism. Land with a sea view is worth a great deal more with a hotel on it, and that is an argument vineyards have never won anywhere.

What survives clings to terraces on slopes too steep for machinery. Everything is done by hand. The Italians call this viticoltura eroica, heroic viticulture, and it is one of the few pieces of wine vocabulary that isn’t overstating things.

The island has its own vocabulary too: Procanico, which is what Elba calls Trebbiano; Ansonica and Vermentino for the whites; Sangioveto and Aleatico for the reds. The Elba DOC arrived in 1967 covering two wines. It now covers fourteen. Considerable ambition for two hundred and fifty hectares, and I admire it enormously.

The bottle worth pursuing is Aleatico Passito dell’Elba, made from dried Aleatico and promoted to DOCG in 2011, the first in the Tuscan archipelago. Dark, sweet, floral, and made in quantities small enough that finding one is less a purchase than a small victory.

Gorgona

Twenty miles off Livorno sits the smallest island in the Tuscan archipelago, almost entirely mountainous and covered in Mediterranean scrub. It has been a monastery, a hermitage, and since 1869 a penal colony, established as a branch of the prison on Pianosa, and now the last of its kind in Europe.

It also has a vineyard: terraces in a natural amphitheatre above the sea, planted to Vermentino and Ansonica for the white, with Sangiovese and Vermentino Nero for a red, that first appeared with the 2015 harvest, aged in terracotta.

In the summer of 2012 the penitentiary emailed Tuscan wineries, around a hundred of them, asking whether anyone might help the inmates make something of the vines. Frescobaldi, whose family has been in Tuscan wine for seven hundred years and whose estates include Ornellaia and Masseto, says he was the one who wrote back. He got on a boat with the prison guards and has been going back ever since.

The inmates work the vineyard and make the wine, trained by Frescobaldi’s agronomists. Since 2014 they have been employed and paid directly by the winery rather than by the prison service, at several times the prison rate, so that they leave with savings as well as a trade. Several have gone on to work at Frescobaldi estates on the mainland after release. Requests for transfer to Gorgona have, unsurprisingly, gone up.

The island is part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, so you can visit, a hundred people a day, booked at least a week ahead, names forwarded to the penitentiary administration. As entry requirements for a vineyard go, it is among the more memorable.

A few thousand bottles are made each year and it is one of the most expensive white wines in Tuscany.

Vin Santo

Nobody agrees where the name comes from. One account has a Greek bishop at the Council of Florence in 1439 comparing the local sweet wine to the wine of Xantos, which the Florentines misheard as santo and adopted without further enquiry. Another says it was the wine of the Mass. Another that it was racked during Holy Week. Tuscany has four separate appellations for this wine and no agreement on what the name means.

Grapes are dried on mats, then sealed into small barrels left deliberately part full and set aside in unheated lofts for years, through summer heat and winter cold. Nobody tops them up. Nobody opens them until it is time. It is a method that requires patience and a certain nerve, and at its best the results are extraordinary.

The version from red grapes is called Occhio di Pernice, partridge’s eye, for the colour.

One last thing

There is no tidy conclusion to draw from a region this large, and I distrust the ones people usually reach for. Tuscany is not a story about tradition, or about rebellion, or about either winning.

It is a story about a great many people making decisions on small pieces of land over a very long time, and about the law arriving afterwards to explain what they meant.

Gorgona is the clearest case. It has no appellation of its own and is unlikely ever to get one, two hectares, a few thousand bottles, bottled simply as Costa Toscana IGT. Nobody set out to make a category, or a philosophy, or a lesson.

Somebody answered an email.

Cin Cin!