The Super Tuscans: The Outlaw Wines That Rewrote Italian Wine Law

Super Tuscan wine is the name for a group of rule-breaking Tuscan reds that became some of the most expensive and admired wines in the world — while officially ranking, for years, as nothing more than humble table wine. Born in the 1960s and 70s when a handful of aristocratic producers defied Italy’s rigid wine laws to make Bordeaux-inspired reds from “forbidden” grapes, the Super Tuscans didn’t just create great bottles. They shamed the entire Italian wine establishment into rewriting its own rulebook. This is the story of the outlaw wines that won.

The straitjacket of DOC

To understand the rebellion you have to understand the rules it broke. When Italy built its Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) system in the 1960s, it codified tradition rather than quality. The Chianti formula, descended from a nineteenth-century recipe by Baron Bettino Ricasoli, had by then hardened into law that required a proportion of white grapes — Trebbiano and Malvasia — to be blended into the red.¹ Producers were forbidden from bottling a pure Sangiovese as “Chianti,” and using French grapes like Cabernet was unthinkable within the appellation.

The result, by the 1960s, was a region whose most famous wine had become a byword for cheap, thin plonk in a straw fiasco. Ambitious growers faced a maddening choice: make watered-down wine that qualified as Chianti, or make something great and watch the state brand it vino da tavola — table wine, the lowest rank of all, the same category as an anonymous jug red. A few chose greatness, and took the demotion.

Sassicaia: the outlaw is born

The first shot was fired not in Chianti but on the Tuscan coast, at Bolgheri, where almost no one grew serious wine. There the Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta had a private obsession: he loved the great red wines of Bordeaux and believed his stony coastal estate, Tenuta San Guido, could grow Cabernet Sauvignon to rival them. From the 1940s he planted Cabernet on gravelly soil he thought resembled Graves — the very name Sassicaia means “the place of many stones.”²

For two decades the wine was made only for the family’s own cellar. Persuaded at last to release it, Tenuta San Guido put out its first commercial vintage — the 1968, released in 1971 — with the help of the brilliant oenologist Giacomo Tachis. Because it was Cabernet grown on the coast, far outside any recognised appellation, this future legend was labelled mere table wine. Then, in a celebrated 1978 blind tasting staged by Decanter magazine, a Sassicaia stunned the wine world by beating a field of top Bordeaux. The “table wine” from Bolgheri was suddenly one of the most talked-about reds on earth.²

Tignanello and the Antinori gamble

If Sassicaia proved the coast could make greatness, it was Tignanello that carried the revolution into the heart of Chianti itself. The house of Antinori, with twenty-six generations of Florentine wine history behind it, was led by the young Marchese Piero Antinori — and Mario Incisa was his relation by marriage, Sassicaia his cousin’s wine. Working again with Giacomo Tachis, Antinori released in the early 1970s a wine from a single Chianti vineyard that broke the rules twice over: it dropped the mandatory white grapes entirely, and it aged the Sangiovese in small French oak barriques, later blended with a little Cabernet.³

Under the law of the day, a wine from the middle of Chianti Classico that refused to add white grapes could not be called Chianti. So Tignanello, too, went out as vino da tavola. The absurdity was now undeniable: two of Italy’s greatest and priciest red wines shared a legal rank with the cheapest bottle in the supermarket. The rebellion had a coast and a heartland; all it lacked was a name.

“Super Tuscan”: the outlaws get a name

That name came from abroad. The British wine writer and merchant Nicolas Belfrage, a Master of Wine steeped in Italy, is generally credited with popularising the term Super Tuscan in the mid-1980s to describe these ambitious, expensive, extra-legal reds.⁴ The English-speaking press seized on it, and the paradox became the marketing: here were the “super” wines of Tuscany that the Italian state insisted on calling table wine. Collectors paid grand-cru prices for bottles that, on paper, outranked nothing at all. No system could sustain that contradiction for long.

From table wine to law: the birth of IGT

In the end, the rebels forced the rulebook to bend to them. In 1992, Italy created a new classification — Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT) — expressly to give these high-quality “table wines” a respectable legal home that allowed non-traditional grapes and blends.⁵ Two years later, in 1994, the coast around Bolgheri was granted its own DOC for Bordeaux-style reds, and Sassicaia was eventually elevated to a rare estate-specific denomination of its own. In 1996 the Chianti rules themselves were reformed: white grapes became optional and pure Sangiovese was finally allowed. The outlaws had not merely survived — they had rewritten the law in their own image.

The legacy: a coast reborn

The consequences reshaped Italian wine entirely. Bolgheri, an empty stretch of coast before Incisa’s experiment, became one of the most sought-after wine addresses in the world, home to icons like Ornellaia and its garagiste Merlot, Masseto. Across Tuscany, the freedom the Super Tuscans won unleashed a generation of ambitious winemaking, and the IGT category they created is now used the length of Italy for serious wines that simply choose not to follow local tradition.⁶ The lesson the outlaws taught — that quality and terroir matter more than a bureaucrat’s recipe — is now the guiding principle of modern Italian wine.

Giacomo Tachis, the quiet architect

Behind both founding wines stood the same soft-spoken genius. Giacomo Tachis (1933–2016), Antinori’s chief oenologist, was the technical mind who translated aristocratic ambition into liquid reality. A student of Bordeaux methods, he brought to Tuscany the tools that would define the Super Tuscans: rigorous selection, temperature control, and above all the French oak barrique, which gave Sangiovese and Cabernet a polish Italian reds had never worn.³ It was Tachis who guided Sassicaia to its 1978 triumph and who blended the first Tignanello and, in 1978, its Cabernet-led sibling Solaia.

Tachis’s influence did not stop at the Tuscan border. In later decades he carried the same philosophy south, consulting on the revival of native grapes in Sardinia and Sicily — a reminder that the Super Tuscan revolution was really a revolution in thinking, one that eventually lifted the whole peninsula. When he died, he was mourned as the man who had dragged Italian fine wine into the modern age.

The wave that followed

Success bred imitators, then a movement. In Chianti, the potter-turned-vigneron Sergio Manetti had already bottled his pure-Sangiovese Le Pergole Torte from Montevertine in 1977, a purist counterpoint to the Cabernet crowd. On the Bolgheri coast, Piero’s brother Lodovico Antinori founded Ornellaia, whose first vintage appeared in the mid-1980s, and from a single hillside within it came Masseto, a Merlot that would become one of the most expensive wines in the world.⁶

Each of these wines began life, like their forebears, as mere vino da tavola. Together they proved the first rebels were no fluke, and they turned a handful of eccentric experiments into the defining category of modern Italian wine — a category built entirely on the willingness to be declassified in pursuit of something better.

Keep exploring Tuscan wine

• Tuscan Wine: The Complete History — the region that the Super Tuscans transformed.
• Chianti: The Complete History — the appellation whose rigid rules sparked the rebellion.
• Antinori: 26 Generations of Tuscan Wine — the house behind Tignanello.
• Brunello di Montalcino — Tuscany’s other great Sangiovese revolution.

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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References & further reading

1. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Chianti,” “vino da tavola,” and “Tuscany.” ↩
2. Nicolas Belfrage MW, Brunello to Zibibbo: The Wines of Tuscany, Central and Southern Italy, 2nd ed. (Mitchell Beazley, 2003), on Tenuta San Guido and Sassicaia. ↩
3. Burton Anderson, Vino: The Wines and Winemakers of Italy (Little, Brown, 1980), the contemporary account of the Antinori and Tignanello revolution. ↩
4. Nicolas Belfrage MW, Life Beyond Lambrusco: Understanding Italian Fine Wine (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985), credited with popularising the term “Super Tuscan.” ↩
5. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, s.v. “IGT” and “Italy, wine laws”; Italian Ministry of Agriculture (MASAF) legislation of 1992. ↩
6. Kerin O’Keefe, Brunello di Montalcino (University of California Press, 2012), and Ian D’Agata, Native Wine Grapes of Italy (UC Press, 2014), on Sangiovese and the modern Tuscan revival. ↩