Tuscan Wine: History of Chianti, Brunello & the Super Tuscans

Tuscan wine is the beating heart of Italian wine — the cypress-and-vineyard landscape the whole world pictures when it imagines Italy in a glass. From the black-rooster hills of Chianti to the lofty Sangiovese of Brunello di Montalcino and the rule-breaking Super Tuscans of the coast, Tuscany has spent seven centuries turning one grape and a handful of hills into some of the most famous wine on earth. This is the full story of Tuscan wine.

The oldest lines on the map

Tuscany was drawing the boundaries of fine wine before almost anyone else. In 1716 the Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici issued an edict fixing the exact zones in which Chianti and a few other Tuscan wines could be produced — and even set up a board to police them. It is one of the earliest legally demarcated wine regions in the world, predating the famous delimitations of the Douro and Champagne. Three hundred years before “protected origin” became a global idea, a Medici grand duke understood that a wine’s name was worth defending.¹

The black rooster and the Iron Baron

The name Chianti has described the hills between Florence and Siena since the Middle Ages, and its emblem, the Gallo Nero (black rooster), comes from a medieval legend about a rooster-race that settled the border between the two warring republics. But modern Chianti was defined by one man: Baron Bettino Ricasoli, a former prime minister of newly-unified Italy known as the “Iron Baron.” After years of trials at his Castello di Brolio, in 1872 he set down a recipe built on Sangiovese — the formula that shaped Chianti for a century. For much of the 1900s the wine was known for its straw-wrapped fiasco flask; today the best of it, from the historic Chianti Classico heartland, is among Italy’s benchmark reds.²

Three centuries before “protected origin” was a global idea, a Medici grand duke was already policing the borders of Chianti.

Brunello: one man, one grape, one hill

Ninety miles south, on the hot hill town of Montalcino, a single family invented what many consider Italy’s greatest wine. In the late 1800s Clemente Santi and his grandson Ferruccio Biondi-Santi did something radical: instead of the usual field blend, they isolated one especially fine strain of Sangiovese — which they called Brunello, “the little dark one” — and made a wine from it alone, built to age for decades. The first true Brunello di Montalcino dates to around 1888, and when Italy created its guaranteed DOCG tier in 1980, Brunello was in the very first group. Its prestige is fiercely guarded: in the 2008 “Brunellopoli” affair, several producers were investigated for allegedly blending in other grapes, a scandal that shook the region precisely because Brunello’s whole identity rests on being 100% Sangiovese.³⁴

The Super Tuscans: the outlaws of Bolgheri

By the 1960s some Tuscan aristocrats had grown frustrated with the thin, rule-bound Chianti of the era — and rebelled. On the coast at Bolgheri, the Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta planted Cabernet Sauvignon and, from 1968, released it commercially as Sassicaia; a few years later his nephews at Antinori made Tignanello (1971), Sangiovese aged in French oak. Because these wines broke the local rules — wrong grapes, wrong methods — Italy’s law could only label them humble vino da tavola, table wine. Yet they commanded the highest prices in Italy and beat famous Bordeaux in blind tastings. The world called them Super Tuscans, and their triumph forced Italy to invent a whole new legal category, the IGT, in 1992 — and eventually to grant Bolgheri its own appellation. The outlaws had rewritten the law.⁵

Sangiovese, the blood of Jove

Behind nearly all of it stands one grape. Sangiovese — whose name is often traced to sanguis Jovis, “the blood of Jupiter” — is Italy’s most-planted variety and the soul of Tuscany. It is notoriously site-sensitive and slow to reveal itself, capable of thin, sour wine in the wrong hands and, in the right ones, of the perfumed, savoury, cherry-and-earth greatness of a fine Chianti Classico or Brunello. Much of the last half-century of Tuscan winemaking has been a patient rediscovery of exactly which clones of Sangiovese suit which hills — a very Italian obsession with the particular.⁶

Vin Santo and the wine windows

Tuscany’s traditions run charmingly deep. Vin Santo — “holy wine” — is the region’s ancient sweet wine, made by hanging grapes to dry over winter and ageing the result for years in tiny barrels, traditionally served with hard almond cantuccini biscuits for dipping. And in the walls of Florence’s Renaissance palazzi survive the buchette del vino, the “little wine windows” — hatches through which noble families once sold wine directly to the street, first opened during the plagues of the 1600s. Shuttered for generations, they were rediscovered and reopened during the 2020 pandemic, pouring glasses to a masked public — a four-hundred-year-old answer to social distancing.⁷

Vernaccia, and Italy’s first DOC

Tuscany is red-wine country, yet it made history with a white. Vernaccia di San Gimignano — a crisp, faintly bitter white from the town of famous towers — was the very first Italian wine granted DOC status, in 1966, the debut of the whole modern Italian classification system. Its fame is far older: it appears in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Renaissance popes and Medici dukes prized it. Tuscany, fittingly, gave Italy both its oldest wine boundaries and its first modern appellation — the region has always been where Italy writes the rules for wine.⁸

The oldest families in wine

Few places on earth carry wine history in their family names the way Tuscany does. The Antinori have been making wine in Florence since 1385 — twenty-six generations, and one of the oldest family businesses in the world. The Frescobaldi trace their vineyards back some seven hundred years and once supplied the English crown and painted-Renaissance courts. The Ricasoli, who gave Chianti its formula, claim a winemaking line reaching to 1141. These dynasties are not marketing: they are living threads connecting today’s bottles to the bankers and nobles of medieval Florence, and a large part of why Tuscan wine feels less like an industry than an inheritance.⁹

Every Tuscan wine story on This Day in Wine History

Go deeper on the grapes, the families and the revolutions behind Tuscan wine:

• Chianti: the 300-year history behind the black rooster
• Brunello di Montalcino: a Tuscan splendour
• The Super Tuscans: the outlaw wines that rewrote the rules
• Sangiovese: the blood of Jove
• Antinori: 26 generations in Chianti Classico

See all Tuscany 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. “Chianti”; and Consorzio Vino Chianti Classico, “1716: the proclamation of the boundaries” (primary/consortium history). chianticlassico.com. ↩
2. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Chianti” and “Ricasoli”; and Nicolas Belfrage MW, Brunello to Zibibbo: The Wines of Tuscany, Central and Southern Italy (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003). Oxford Reference. ↩
3. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Brunello di Montalcino”; and Belfrage, Brunello to Zibibbo (Mitchell Beazley, 2003). ↩
4. “Brunello producers cleared / the Montalcino inquiry” (the 2008 “Brunellopoli” affair), Decanter. decanter.com. ↩
5. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Super-Tuscans” and “vino da tavola.” ↩
6. Ian D’Agata, Native Wine Grapes of Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), on Sangiovese; and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Sangiovese.” University of California Press. ↩
7. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Vin Santo”; and on the Florentine wine windows, Smithsonian Magazine. smithsonianmag.com. ↩
8. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Vernaccia di San Gimignano” and “DOC” — on Italy’s first DOC (1966). ↩
9. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Antinori,” “Frescobaldi” and “Ricasoli” — on the historic Tuscan wine dynasties. ↩