Central and Southern Italy

Wine is deeply embedded in Tuscany’s cultural heritage—the famous medieval Florentine poet Dante Alighieri praised the Vernaccia of San Gimignano, and legislation delimiting the Chianti zone dates to 1716. The first DOC and DOCG zones to be authorized in Italy were Tuscan. Wine and commercial agriculture are big business in Tuscany, and the hills are a patchwork of olive tree groves, vineyards, and wheat fields—a natural evolution of the “promiscuous” agriculture that ancient Romans practiced, wherein these three staple crops of Tuscany were planted side by side in the same fields. In the past, Chianti was synonymous with Italian wine—and a reminder, not unfairly, of its troubled quality. Historically bottled in a fiasco due to the inferior quality of Italian glass, the squat, straw-covered Chianti bottles came to epitomize the rustic, cheap nature of Italian wine in the late 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Tuscany’s winemakers have responded with a surge in quality over the last quarter century, slashing vineyard yields and building on the successes of the “Super-Tuscan” trailblazers Marquis Mario Rocchetta, who released the first commercial vintage of Sassicaia in 1968, and his nephew Piero Antinori, whose Tignanello bottling soon followed. While the benchmark for quality has been raised significantly, it may be at the expense of typicity—the Bordeaux grapes and model of winemaking extend great influence over the modern Tuscan estate. Nonetheless