Italian Wine: The Complete History

Italian wine is the most diverse on earth. No country grows more grape varieties, makes wine in more places, or binds wine so tightly to daily life and the table. From the fog-shrouded Nebbiolo hills of Piedmont to the sun-baked volcanic slopes of Sicily, Italy is less a single wine country than twenty of them stitched together — a peninsula the ancient Greeks admired so much they called it Oenotria, “the land of trained vines.” This is the full story of Italian wine: three thousand years old, nearly ruined in the twentieth century, and reborn as one of the great wine cultures of the world.

Oenotria: the land the Greeks named for wine

Long before Italy was a country, it was a vineyard. When Greek colonists sailed to the south of the peninsula around the eighth century BCE, they found the native peoples already growing vines, and they were impressed enough to give the land a name: Oenotria, often translated as “the land of trained vines.” Further north, the mysterious Etruscans were making and trading wine on a serious scale, shipping it in distinctive pottery across the western Mediterranean. Wine was woven into Italian soil a thousand years before it reached most of France.¹

Rome, and the first fine wine

It was Rome that turned wine from a local drink into an empire-wide industry — and arguably invented the very idea of a “great” wine. The Romans obsessed over vintages and vineyard sites; their most prized wine, Falernian, from the slopes of Campania, was aged for decades and written about like a modern first growth, its best years remembered and traded long after. As the legions marched north and west, they carried the vine with them, planting the ancestors of the vineyards of France, Germany and Spain. Italy, in a real sense, is where European wine culture was standardised and spread.¹²

The Romans admired a great vintage two thousand years before Bordeaux drew up its first classification.

A thousand years of many Italies

Then Rome fell, and Italy splintered. For more than a millennium there was no single “Italy” at all, but a patchwork of city-states, kingdoms and papal lands, each with its own grapes, its own traditions, and its own wine. This is the deep reason Italian wine is so bewilderingly varied today: while France slowly centralised around a handful of noble grapes, Italy’s hundreds of valleys each kept their own local varieties alive. The country was only politically unified in 1861 — and its wine has never been unified at all, which turns out to be its greatest strength.³

The black rooster and the Iron Baron

Some of Italy’s most enduring wine came out of this fragmented age. The name Chianti has been used since the 1300s, and its symbol, the Gallo Nero (black rooster), comes from a medieval legend about a rooster-race that fixed the border between the rival republics of Florence and Siena. But modern Chianti was really defined by one man: Baron Bettino Ricasoli, a former prime minister of a newly united Italy, known as the “Iron Baron.” In 1872, after decades of experiments at his Castello di Brolio, he wrote down a recipe for Chianti built around the Sangiovese grape — a formula that shaped the wine for the next century.⁴

Quantity, catastrophe, and the methanol reckoning

For much of the twentieth century, Italy chose quantity over quality, flooding the world with cheap wine in straw-covered fiaschi. It nearly destroyed the country’s reputation — and in 1986 it turned deadly. Unscrupulous producers were caught lacing cheap wine with industrial methanol to boost its strength; at least nineteen people died, others were blinded, and Italian wine exports collapsed almost overnight. The methanol scandal was the worst moment in Italian wine history — and, paradoxically, its turning point. Shocked into reform, growers, regulators and consumers pivoted hard toward quality, and the share of Italy’s wine made under strict DOC/IGT rules climbed from a small fraction to the majority in the decades that followed.⁵

The DOC, and the Super Tuscan rebellion

Italy had begun building a modern quality system in 1963 with its Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC), modelled on the French AOC, topped in 1980 by a stricter guaranteed tier, the DOCG. But the rules could also strangle innovation — and in Tuscany, a band of aristocrats rebelled. Starting with Sassicaia (first commercially released in 1968) and Tignanello (1971), they made superb wines using “forbidden” grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon, or Sangiovese aged in French oak, none of which the local rules allowed. The law could only classify these wines as humble vino da tavola — table wine — yet they outsold and outscored the region’s official bottles. The world named them the Super Tuscans, and their success eventually forced Italy to rewrite its own rules.⁶

The great regions of Italian wine

Italy makes wine everywhere, but a handful of regions define its greatness. Here are the ones every Italian-wine lover comes to know.

In the fog (nebbia) of the Langhe hills in the north-west, the Nebbiolo grape makes Barolo and Barbaresco — pale, perfumed, ferociously structured reds long called “the king of wines and the wine of kings.” In the 1980s and ’90s Piedmont tore itself apart in the “Barolo Wars,” as a wave of modernists embraced French oak and shorter maceration while traditionalists defended the old long-aged style — a feud that ended, more or less, in a truce that made the wines better than ever.⁷

Tuscany is the Italian region the world knows best: the cypress-lined hills that give Chianti Classico, the powerful Brunello di Montalcino, elegant Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, and the rule-breaking Super Tuscans of the Bolgheri coast — all built, in one way or another, on the Sangiovese grape and the Tuscan gift for marrying wine to food.⁸

The Veneto, around Verona and Venice, is a study in extremes. It produces the oceans of easy, joyful Prosecco that made Italian fizz a global phenomenon — and, from the same broad region, one of Italy’s most profound reds: Amarone della Valpolicella, made by drying the grapes for months before pressing (the ancient appassimento method) to concentrate them into something rich and almost port-like.⁹

The sun-drenched south — Campania, Puglia, and above all the volcanic island of Sicily — is where Italian wine both began and is now most exciting. Ancient native grapes like Aglianico, Nero d’Avola and the whites of Mount Etna, long used for anonymous bulk wine, have been rediscovered as some of the most distinctive and best-value wines in the country — the cutting edge of Italy’s quality revolution.¹⁰

Why Italian wine is like no other

What finally sets Italy apart is variety. According to the most thorough survey ever made, Italy grows on the order of two thousand distinct native grape varieties — far more than any other country, and several hundred of them commercially important. Where much of the wine world has converged on the same familiar international grapes, Italy has spent three thousand years keeping its local ones alive, valley by valley. That is why a lifetime is not enough to drink Italy: there is always another grape, from another hill, that grows nowhere else on earth.¹¹

Italy guards those identities fiercely. When Prosecco exploded into a global craze, producers faced a problem: “Prosecco” was the name of the grape, so anyone anywhere could grow it and use the word. So in 2009 Italy officially renamed the grape Glera and turned “Prosecco” into a protected place — a legal manoeuvre, echoing Champagne’s, that locked one of the world’s most popular wines to a corner of the Veneto.¹²

Explore Italy, region by region

Every one of these regions has its own deep archive of stories on This Day in Wine History — the grapes, the feuds, the families and the revolutions. Pick a region and read them all.

Every Italian wine story on This Day in Wine History

Go deeper on the regions, grapes and revolutions behind Italian wine:

• Piedmont: Italy’s most decorated wine region
• Chianti: the 300-year history behind the black rooster
• The Super Tuscans: the outlaw wines that rewrote the rules
• The history of Prosecco
• Nebbiolo: the noble grape of Barolo and Barbaresco
• The revolution of Barolo: traditionalists vs modernists

See all Italian wine articles →

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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Native Wine Grapes of Italy

Ian D’Agata

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Sources & further reading

1. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding, eds., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Italy,” “Etruscans” and “Oenotria.” Oxford Reference. ↩
2. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Ancient Rome” and “Falernian” — on Roman viticulture and its spread across Europe. ↩
3. Nicolas Belfrage MW, Barolo to Valpolicella: The Wines of Northern Italy (London: Faber & Faber, 2003) — on the historical fragmentation of Italian wine. ↩
4. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Chianti” and “Ricasoli” — on the black rooster and the 1872 formula. ↩
5. “Poisoning Scandal Rocks Italian Wine Export Business,” The Washington Post, 9 April 1986 (contemporary reporting); and “40 Years Ago: The Methanol Scandal in Italy,” wein.plus. washingtonpost.com. ↩
6. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Super-Tuscans” and “vino da tavola” — on Sassicaia, Tignanello and the rebellion. ↩
7. Nicolas Belfrage MW, Barolo to Valpolicella: The Wines of Northern Italy (Faber, 2003), and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Barolo” and “Nebbiolo.” ↩
8. Nicolas Belfrage MW, Brunello to Zibibbo: The Wines of Tuscany, Central and Southern Italy (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003), and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Tuscany” and “Sangiovese.” ↩
9. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Prosecco” and “Amarone della Valpolicella.” ↩
10. Belfrage, Brunello to Zibibbo (Mitchell Beazley, 2003), and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Sicily.” ↩
11. Ian D’Agata, Native Wine Grapes of Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) — the definitive survey of Italy’s native varieties. University of California Press. ↩
12. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Glera” and “Prosecco” — on the 2009 renaming of the grape. ↩