During the second half of the seventeenth century, grain prices declined to such an extent that the Grand Duchy of Tuscany imposed higher duties on all overland imports of grain into its Florentine domain.1 As a result, there was increasing interest in expanding viticulture and commercializing the production and export of wine. Landholders already well understood that wine would garner a higher market price than other agricultural products. In Chianti, mezzadri grew wine grapes on their poderi and until the nineteenth century typically vinified them in primitive wine cellars at their case coloniche. This is confirmed by an architectural plan of the ideal casa colonica published in 1770. The author Ferdinando Morozzi’s blueprint incorporates a vat room (tinaia) with a capacity of many vats and an entryway large enough for oxen to deliver grapes or vats of must coming in from the fields.2 With time, the mezzadri and the padroni made arrangements that allowed the mezzadri to use some of the fattoria’s wine processing and storage facilities (cantine, the plural of cantina) for their own winemaking. Such arrangements were usually fee based. For example, a mezzadro could use the grape-crushing, winemaking, and storage facilities at the fattoria’s cantina in exchange for an extra 10 to 15 percent of his crop or production. By the nineteenth century, the fattore had typically taken over the winemaking, maturing, and wine sale activities of the fattoria and all of its poderi. After the primary alcoholic fermentation, wine was racked into barili of about fifty liters (thirteen gallons) or less and divided between the mezzadro and the padrone according to the provisions of their mezzadria contract. Typically, the mezzadro family consigned a portion of its wine to the fattoria (to offset its debts to the estate for working capital and other advances), kept the remaining portion for the family (primarily for sale), and took some of the press cake to make mezzo vino (also known as acquarello or vinello) for its daily consumption. The press cake was left over after the fattore had pressed the wine out of the skins in the fermentation tank. To make mezzo vino, the mezzadri soaked the press cake in water and then fermented the resulting juice, which produced a light but coarse wine for family use.
Proprietors often owned their own vineyards, in addition to the land that their sharecroppers farmed. These, though, were usually quite small. Some landowners took pride in the quality of the wine made from their personal vineyards, serving it to guests at their country villas or urban palazzi. Because the fattore had more control over the growing and vinification of these grapes, the estate wines were of a higher quality than what the mezzadri made in their poderi. Some landholders sold a portion directly from their palaces in Florence via small arched doorways framed in stone, called buchetti (the plural of buchetto), finestrini (the plural of finestrino), or porticciole (the plural of porticciola), which were cut into a wall three or four feet above the ground. These points of sale were discreetly positioned, in the wall of a palace that fronted an alleyway rather than a main thoroughfare. This practice continued until the late eighteenth century. Some thirty to forty buchetti are still visible today in Florence, although they have been shuttered for centuries.
The mezzadria system remained profitable and stable for landowners. Over centuries, they fine-tuned the social as well as contractual relationships at its foundation. The fattore was required to remain unmarried, while the principal housekeeper and manager of the casa padronale (owner’s home) was a woman called the fattoressa, who was typically married to the estate’s game warden, the guardia della caccia. By the late 1700s, the expression avere un podere in Chianti (to have a podere in Chianti) was a way of saying that one owned a cash cow. The profitability of owning poderi combined with the increase in Florence’s population during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave rise to a great expansion of land planted to vines in Chianti (although these were not specialized vineyards, given the widespread use of promiscuous agriculture in the mezzadria system).
Before the 1700s, the red wines of the Florence environs were called vermigli (the plural of vermiglio, meaning “bright or intense red”) or, in export markets, by the name of the originating city, Florence. A bando (edict or decree) of August 6, 1611, prohibited the bottling in fiasco (flask) of low-quality vermigli, requiring that this wine type be sold only in barrels. Glass flasks were designated for higher-quality wine because glass was easier to clean than wood and therefore would allow the wine to age better. Sealed glass flasks were also more secure from a quality control perspective. Wine stored in large wooden barrels for transport and shipment was more easily subject to adulteration than wine in sealed flasks. The 1611 bando defined low-quality wine as that made from grapes on the fertile plains that extended from Florence to Empoli.3 This legislation evidences that the Medici rulers of the early seventeenth century already understood the connection between wine quality and origin. This idea eventually crystallized in the two bandi (the plural of bando) of 1716 that delimited four wine regions within the Florentine State and regulated the commerce of quality wine.
According to Giovanni Cosimo Villifranchi, a botanist who wrote a treatise titled Oenologia toscana (Tuscan enology) in 1773, the wines of the territory of Chianti were principally red and made of Canaiolo with varying amounts of Sangiovese, Mammolo, and Marzemino. The region’s white wines were made primarily from Trebbiano and San Colombano.4 The San Colombano that Villifranchi mentions may have been what is now called San Colombana or Verdea. On its own, it made a delicate white wine, usually called Verdea. A sweet Trebbiano wine was acclaimed from the Valdarno di Sopra area near the town of San Giovanni, in the Arno River Valley between the Chianti and Pratomagno Mountains. Malvasia is also mentioned frequently. White wines, unlike red wines, often went by grape varietal names. The township of San Gimignano (west of the Elsa River Valley) was known for its Vernaccia, a local white variety. Just to the west of Florence, the red wines of Carmignano, particularly from the village of Artimino, had earned a reputation for quality. The town of Montalcino, south of Siena, was known for a highly prized sweet white wine, Moscadello. Vin santo was and remains a Tuscan (and Chianti) dried white grape wine with versions that range from dry to sweet. It has always been made in tiny quantities and served at special occasions or given as a gift.
Chianti and other Tuscan wines were often shipped from Livorno (referred to by the English as Leghorn) or sent overland to other countries during the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. The historical record of this period has many references to the export of Chianti and Florence wine, principally to English merchants. In the early 1670s, Paolo Minucci of Radda wrote notes explaining the verse of the artist and poet Lorenzo Lippi. In them, he observed that merchants were in “possession of Chianti, which in those days in great quantities was sailing to faraway countries.”5 In 1673, a Medici cellar master shipped wines overseas, among them well-aged Chianti. He reported that the Chianti would reach buyers in satisfactory condition.6 A 1691 poem attributed to the Englishman Richard Ames celebrates wines available in London. It describes Florence wine, but not specifically Chianti wine, as being sold in “flasks” and tasting “very good” and “delicate.”7 Cosimo III de’ Medici in the late 1600s and early 1700s often gifted flasks of Chianti to other European sovereigns and members of their royal courts. As an ardent Anglophile, he sent annual shipments of a chest of Chianti wine to friends such as Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore.8 His activity helped open the English market to Chianti and stimulate interest in Tuscan wine.9 England’s Queen Anne (1665–1714) is reputed to have preferred Florence wine above all others. In 1805 an English commentator, while affirming Queen Anne’s preference for Chianti and acknowledging that the most esteemed Italian wines were the “Aliatico, Chianti, and Monte Pulciano,” expressed doubt that Florence wine would “please a palate accustomed to Claret, Champagne, and Burgundy. . . . That which you drink in England for Florence wine, is Chianti—even to this brandy is added at Leghorn to give it strength; no other will bear the sea.”10 The Florence wine being sold in London in the late 1690s was “bottled in flasks and packed in wicker hampers” and considered “a fashionable alternative” to the wines of Spain and Portugal, which were flooding the market during a period of hostilities between England and France.11 Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), “was especially fond of ‘Florence wine,’ probably Chianti or Montepulciano.”12 In 1696, a large shipment of wine—fourteen barrels holding a total of 150 barili (about 6,837 liters), and six cases of fiaschi—was sent from Brolio Castle to a Florentine merchant-broker based in Amsterdam.13 Letters dated 1715, 1716, and 1717 in the Brolio archive further attest to exports of Chianti beyond the Alps and overseas during this period.14 In 1735, the Livorno trader David Sceriman wrote to the then-baron Ricasoli, “[Because I] suggested to a friend in London the precious wine of Brolio, it will be easy for you to resolve to give me a commission on an order of two hundred cases.”15
Although some accounts say the reputation of Tuscan wines was favorable during the seventeenth century, others say it had problems. Many of the unfavorable reports were related to instability during sea transport, though land transport must have been even worse, given the movement stress of barrels strapped to wagons traversing winding, unpaved roads. France, Spain, Portugal, and Germany had easier access to England by sea than Tuscany had. The Alps also made land routes difficult for Tuscan wine exports. Tuscan wines deteriorated during shipment, particularly in the warm months of the year. Charles Longland, an English merchant living in Livorno, wrote to Secretary of the English Admiralty Robert Blackborne on January 17, 1653, “I am sending the Florence wine to Marseilles, to be laden on an English ship there, because if it is not home [in England] before May, it will be spoiled.”16 For Florence wine (including Chianti), time apparently was of the essence.
Tuscan merchants selling Chianti in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries confronted another challenge. Fraud and profiteering had tarnished the reputation of Chianti in the English wine trade as early as the first decade of the 1600s. Villifranchi, in his Oenologia toscana, traced the origin of this image problem back to a single episode. (An English botanist had previously and identically reported this in both a Swiss German and an English publication in the late eighteenth century.)17 The 1607 vintage for Chianti was disastrous in quality and volume of production. Given the high market demand for Chianti, profiteering merchants, whether Chiantigiani themselves (according to Villifranchi and his foreign sources) or Tuscan or English merchants working out of the port of Livorno, mixed inferior wine from other zones with the already weak Chianti wine and sold it as “Chianti” for a handsome profit on the English market. From that point on, Villifranchi claimed, the reputation of Chianti wine in the English market had paid the price for this original commercial sin. He described how a century later a similar episode plagued Chianti. The 1710 vintage was also a difficult one with low yields. As in 1607, there was systemic fraud in the trade of Chianti wine of that vintage in the English market.18 The situation was so problematic that merchants began shipping Chianti wine in small sealed glass flasks rather than large wooden casks.19 Villifranchi noted that the export of Chianti wine had held its own in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries but had decreased from 1725 to 1775, mostly due to continued fraud and competition from areas such as Burgundy that were making more delicate and stable wines.20 Sir Edward Barry, commenting from England in 1775, confirmed Villifranchi’s assessment: “We seldom meet with any good wines imported here from Italy. The Chianti was formerly much esteemed in England, but entirely lost its character; large quantities of the red Florence are still imported in flasks; but from the disagreeable roughness, and other qualities, seldom drank. They have a freshness, and beautiful deep colour, and are probably chiefly consumed in making artificial claret, or Burgundy Wines, or in giving more lightness and spirit to heavy vapid port.”21 The eighteenth-century Sienese economist Salustio Antonio Bandini reported that Chianti had been four or five times more expensive in the English market at the beginning of the 1700s than in the 1730s.22
Just as late nineteenth-century fraud in the French market was the stimulus for appellation control laws that were created in the twentieth century, the fraud related to the export of Chianti wine in the seventeenth century was the stimulus for Cosimo III’s 1716 decrees. The first of these two bandi, that of July 18, established a regulatory regime to govern the production and sale of designated areas’ prized wines to be shipped overseas.23 It covered four regions within the Florentine State in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, namely Chianti, Pomino, Carmignano, and Valdarno di Sopra, but did not delimit them. That was left to the second bando of 1716, which was issued on September 24. Together these two bandi created what are considered the first legal appellations of origin for wine in the world.24 Judging from the paucity of contemporaneous references to these decrees, it is reasonable to assume that they were not enforced. Peter Leopold, the Habsburg-Lorraine grand duke of Tuscany, noted the diminution of the export of Chianti wine to England during his tour of the Chianti region in 1773. He blamed merchants for fraudulent blending, which had degraded the quality and reputation of the wine. The harm was so great that it had also diminished investment in Chianti vineyards.25 Filippo Mazzei, an ancestor of the Mazzei family that now owns the Fonterutoli estate in Castellina, in 1760 wrote that he suspected the wine exported to England was not of the same quality as that which his family consumed at home. He concluded that this was due to the unethical behavior of merchants who sold the wine in England.26 In the early 1770s, having expertise and commercial connections, he opened a shop named Martini and Company in London, from which he sold wine and foodstuffs imported from Tuscany (including, undoubtedly, real Chianti).27
Italians refer to Lorraine as Lorena, which gives its name to the period ushered in by the arrival of the Habsburg-Lorraine rulers. Peter Leopold became the grand duke of Tuscany in 1765, inheriting the title from his father, the first Lorena grand duke of Tuscany. He made a practice of visiting all the areas of his duchy and chronicled his observations in his Relazioni sul governo della Toscana, including his inspections of Panzano, Castellina, Radda, and Gaiole (with stops at the “Amma” and “Broglio” estates) in historic Chianti in July 1773.28 The Lorena government supported more liberal trade policies to strengthen the economy of the grand duchy. It also favored the repopulation of rural areas to boost agricultural production, particularly of grain. The government encouraged this rural expansion during periodic famines, the most catastrophic of which occurred in 1764, just before Peter Leopold became the grand duke.29 It coincided with a population surge in the cities and towns of Tuscany.30 The coincidence of food shortages and the movement of populations from urban to rural areas set the stage during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century and the first thirty years of the nineteenth for the further expansion of the mezzadria system.31 Mixed plantings, dominated by vines, blanketed the fertile plains and crept farther up the Chianti hills. The population influx in the countryside led landowners to subdivide their poderi. This resulted in even more intensive farming to exploit every bit of land, so the training of vines became as much vertical as horizontal. Crops were grown at their base, principally cereals because of their essential nutritive value. The mezzadri ground the wheat they grew into flour so that they could make bread throughout the year. Bread, olive oil, and wine were the basis of their diet. Vines were increasingly planted using living trees as supports (sostegni vivi). The foliage of these trees served as food for oxen and other work animals, given that there was no meadowland set aside for forage crops. In the winter the trees were pruned back, providing firewood for heating and cooking.
Low-trained vines on stakes were widely acknowledged to produce better, but less, fruit for wine production. Sharecroppers, however, were naturally more interested in quantity of production and the full range of agricultural products needed for their sustenance, and landholders found the mezzadria system too profitable to abandon. Despite the inability of promiscuous agriculture to produce wines that could compete on the export market, and despite Tuscany’s need to realize income from its principal product, wine, there was little appetite among landowners to move to a system of monoculture. Ignazio Malenotti, a priest and teacher of agricultural science living in San Gimignano in the early nineteenth century, voiced the Tuscan landowners’ reasoning: “And even given that the vine married to the hedge maple produces a wine inferior to that which derives from a low-trained vine, will not that defect be compensated by greater abundance, from saving the cost of the stakes, and many other benefits generally recognized by us and affirmed by all Tuscan landholders?”32 An Englishman who wrote a commercial report on Tuscany and other Italian regions during this same period offered a starkly different perspective on the culture of the vine in Tuscany: “In the countries which make superb wine, every other cultivation is subordinate to that of the grape; while in Tuscany, the vine is rarely given special attention; the great desire is for quantity, not quality.”33
Sharecroppers had to be clever farmers to support their families, given Chianti’s rocky terrain. It was imperative for mezzadri to produce the maximum quantity and diversity of crops from their land. They could not focus on viticulture alone, as was being done (and had been done) in other European agricultural regions, such as Burgundy or Bordeaux. Ultimately, this resulted in the mezzadri bringing in lower-quality fruit for making wine. The fattore who oversaw the production of the wine had only on-the-job experience with vinification. His commercial experience was limited to visits to urban markets, where he met with agents and merchants to arrange for the sale and transport of his fattoria’s wine. Low-quality grapes transformed by primitive methods could not yield quality wine. Tuscan agricultural treatises were, with few exceptions, written by intellectuals, not people with experience growing grapes or making wine. Meanwhile, in France and southern Germany, the agricultural sciences were advancing. Agriculture was more esteemed in these cultures than in Tuscany, and they were not dominated by sharecropping systems. Unlike ecclesiastical institutions in Tuscany, religious orders such as the Cistercians in France and Germany relied on their own monks and lay brothers to do their own farming. The careful monocultural practices of these farmers yielded better crops, particularly of wine grapes. Moreover, farmers in those countries tended to be more involved with wine production, so they could see the connection between good grapes and sound vinification practices. Hence, while the wine industries of France and southern Germany became more sophisticated, winemaking in Chianti saw very few innovations as the mezzadria system solidified its grip on agriculture. Change had to wait for the early nineteenth century, when viticultural and winemaking expertise began to be applied in Tuscany.
On the more fertile lands outside Chianti, vines were almost universally strung up individual trees or strewn between them. In the rockier and higher-elevation areas of Chianti, such as Lamole, the tendency was to train them lower and on stakes, though there were olive trees sprinkled here and there among the staked vines. Such dry and low-fertility soils, combined with low training, produced higher-quality grapes for winemaking. For this reason, Chianti wine was traditionally recognized as of higher quality than other red Tuscan wines. In the Florence market of April 1830, for instance, Chianti was selling for thirty-two to thirty-six lire per barrel, while wines from the Tuscan plains sold for twenty to twenty-two.34 Only the wines of Carmignano and Montepulciano were as highly regarded as Chianti. Genuine Chianti was also acknowledged to withstand the stresses of transport better than most other Tuscan wines. Nonetheless, because merchants consolidated wines from throughout Tuscany for shipment and continued to pass off such blends as Chianti, it was impossible for real Chianti to distinguish itself from the mass of mediocre Tuscan wine in the export market.
Exports of Tuscan wine deteriorated in the last decades of the 1700s, but the region produced more wine than could be consumed domestically.35 The Lorena rulers understood that it needed an export market for its wines. The prized targets remained the wealthy English and German markets.36 Peter Leopold was a liberal reformer in a fiercely conservative Tuscany. Among his many innovations relevant to the trade of wine were the lowering of export duties and the improvement of road networks. The timing for exporting wine was favorable because overall the value of wine was increasing in the late 1700s.37 Tuscan producers, however, were still in the shadow of the high-profile and established French wine industry while they competed for market share with lower-priced Spanish and Portuguese wine in the English and German markets.38 The negative reputation of Tuscan wines continued to plague Tuscan and Chianti wine producers, who increasingly recognized the importance of these export markets for improving the profitability of their agricultural production.
The Accademia dei Georgofili (Georgofili—a word of Greek origin meaning “lovers of the land”—Academy) was born in Florence in 1753. It was a body of thought leaders in the field of agriculture. Its model was the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (Experiment Academy), dedicated to scientific research, which became most well known for the work of Galileo Galilei. The Georgofili’s strength was its focus on agronomy. Among its ranks were not only members of the intelligentsia but also large landholders who managed their properties using the mezzadria system. The Georgofili was a forum not only for local agricultural issues: it sought out the most current agricultural research in Europe for discussion and debate. It also held competitions, publicly announced, on topics often relating to a pressing agricultural problem. The Georgofili’s jury was responsible for determining the best manuscript, and it would not award any prize if it did not find a worthy submission. Winning a competition was prestigious, given the jury’s composition and high standards. The Georgofili, recognizing the export crisis in the late 1700s, focused on the task of improving the durability of Tuscan wine during shipment so as to rectify its negative image in the export markets. In 1771 it sponsored a competition in which participants had to answer the question “What should be the concern of government, what should be the responsibility and the work of property owners, to increase, expand, and maintain the export market for Tuscan wines?” Villifranchi’s submission “Oenologia toscana,” subsequently published, won the award.
In his manuscript, Villifranchi advised that to increase their share of the export market, Tuscans would have to improve the whole chain of wine production, from the growing of the grapes through the making of the wine to its commercialization. A year later, Ferdinando Paoletti published his manual L’arte di fare il vino perfetto e durevole da poter servire al commercio estero (The art of making wine perfect and durable so as to service the export market). In it he noted that French wines, unlike Tuscan ones, were transported freely around Europe without compromising their quality. This was due, he asserted, to French care and industry. “The French in Paris laugh at the Tuscans and claim that if they were to have the Tuscan climate they could make higher-priced wines than their own.”39 A member of the Georgofili Academy, Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, in his contemporaneous treatise Riflessioni sopra la poca durata dei moderni vini di Toscana (Reflections on the lack of durability of modern-day Tuscan wines), concurred with Villifranchi and Paoletti about the shortcomings of Tuscan wine, concluding: “The one defect of the modern wines of Tuscany is that they have too brief a shelf life.”40 He asserted that only when Chianti was pure and well made could it withstand degradation during extensive sea transport.41 Moreover, Targioni Tozzetti concluded that this brief shelf life forced producers to sell the wine soon after production, thus making it difficult for them to maintain stable pricing from year to year.42
In 1824, Paolo Betti informed the Georgofili Academy about successful exports of Tuscan wine to the United States, including Boston.43 Lapo de’ Ricci, the owner of a wine estate in Castellina in Chianti and an engaged member of the Georgofili, also tested the ability of his wines to travel long distances without degradation.44 He reported on a similar experiment that he conducted in 1825 with an American, Benjamin Tibbits. Ricci shipped barrels and bottles to New York to see if his Chianti could arrive there in the same condition as when it left. After it arrived, Tibbits was impressed by the wine and bought some. He shipped the rest back to Ricci, whose friends in Florence preferred the taste of this Chianti to wine that had not traveled at all. Ricci conducted additional experiments, shipping wine to and from England, Scotland, Denmark, Egypt, and Antigua, among other places. He showed that Chianti could be successfully shipped long distances, if it were sent in barrels containing the equivalent of six hundred bottles of wine (as was customary for shipments of French wines from France).45
To ensure the durability of exported Tuscan wine, the Georgofili Academy in 1835 proposed that a Società Enologica (Enological company) be established at Livorno, the port of exit for most Tuscan wine. It would house a depository where wines could be assessed for quality. Those not fit for export would be distilled and sold off as spirits.46 Cosimo Ridolfi, then the vice president of the Georgofili, set up a commission to organize this company. According to him, a quality Tuscan wine should exhibit “perfect transparency, stability, durability, indeed the ability to improve over time, and to maintain its color; taste which one identifies as dry, and similar in every way to the wine of every year.”47 During the Lorena period, he was Tuscany’s leading thinker (and practitioner) in the field of agricultural research. Northwest of Chianti, at his family farm of Meleto in Castelfiorentino (not to be confused with Meleto Castle in Gaiole), he had set up an agricultural school designed to introduce novel techniques. With two other influential agricultural specialists of his day, Giovan Pietro Vieusseux and Raffaelo Lambruschini, he created a literary vehicle, Giornale agrario della Toscana, to promulgate innovations in agriculture. Ridolfi asked Bettino Ricasoli, then a twenty-five-year-old Florentine noble who had just become a member of the Georgofili, to head the Società Enologica. Ricasoli, though hailing from Chianti’s most storied family, was an unusual choice, because of his lack of experience in the wine business. The then–grand duke of Tuscany, Leopold II (the grandson of Peter Leopold), had already named the youthful Baron Ricasoli, orphaned along with his younger brothers at the age of eighteen, as their legal guardian. The Società Enologica, however, did not come of age. The Georgofili organizers could not raise sufficient capital or assemble enough collaborators to support this initiative.48 Ricasoli, whose family’s assets were burdened by debts, set out to reverse the family’s fortunes. Though the Tuscan nobility considered agriculture less prestigious than other pursuits, as a young man he “retired” to Brolio, in Gaiole, to revitalize the production of his ancient family’s many estates.
In 1824 there had been a sudden drop in the price of grain, which alarmed Florentine landowners. By the 1830s the price of wine had also decreased, threatening the economy of Tuscany. In April 1833, in the open arena of the Georgofili Academy, there began a debate “on the advantages and disadvantages whether moral or economic of the mezzadria system.” The idea that this system was at the root of Tuscany’s economic woes was beginning to germinate. However, by this time Tuscany’s social order depended on the stability ensured by the mezzadria system. Gino Capponi, hailing from one of Florence’s leading noble families, described this reality without equivocation: “The system is essentially connected with our existence; it is the absolute condition of our being, the physiologic necessity of our country.”49 The powerful landholders of Tuscany, many of whom were members of the Georgofili, were not prepared to embrace any change that would undermine the mezzadria system and their collective agricultural security. Despite the openness of the Georgofili as a forum for intellectual debate and discussion, few tangible improvements were made in the viticultural practices of Tuscan (and Chianti) estates. Mezzadri were wed to mixed agriculture because it both met their needs for self-sufficiency and had the potential for added income from bigger grape harvests (given that tree-trained vines in mixed agriculture each produced more bunches than low-staked vines). Florentine landowners still largely believed that the mezzadro lacked the intelligence and industry of a landholder and thus had little interest in changing how he worked. Modern economic theorists have a different perspective on why the mezzadria system was incapable of supporting innovation and investment. They reason that within a “property-rights framework”50 and based on the standard terms and conditions of the mezzadria contract, the mezzadro was loathe to make any improvements, given that he would be required to share 50 percent of any incremental return with the landholder, who, for his part, was loathe to make further capital investments, since he would be compelled to credit the mezzadro with 50 percent of any return on them. Over time, stability became stasis for both landowner and mezzadro—and compromised the quality of their wine. Ridolfi’s agricultural school at Meleto, however, was designed to educate mezzadri and fattori (the plural of fattore). In 1875, Sidney Sonnino, an Italian politician and Chianti estate owner, in his nuanced defense of the mezzadria system, particularly for arboreal agriculture (e.g., grapevines and olive trees), argued that the problem was not the incapacity or unwillingness of the mezzadri to learn but the unwillingness of the disinterested landowners to teach them: “It is unjust to accuse the farmer of opposing any improvement in the manner in which he farms. When the farmer has become convinced of the superiority of a new method, he is the first to want to change.”51 Sadly for Chianti and its wine, Ridolfi’s teachings and Sonnino’s writings failed to inspire more Florentine landowners to educate and encourage their mezzadri to improve viticultural practices.
With roots from the Valdarno di Sopra area to the east of Chianti, the Ricasoli family has likely been producing wine since the eleventh century. It has ruled Castello di Brolio in the township of Gaiole since 1141. Already at the end of the 1600s, the family was exporting wine to Amsterdam and England. At the end of the 1700s, it owned three fattorie comprising two thousand hectares (4,942 acres, or 7.7 square miles) in Chianti, including Brolio, and one fattoria, Terranuova, of three hundred hectares (741 acres) in Valdarno di Sopra. In his efforts to restore the family fortune, Bettino Ricasoli sold a fattoria just outside the city of Florence. Then, in 1830, he married Anna di Filippo Bonaccorsi, which brought more liquid wealth. In 1838 he moved his family to Brolio from Florence to manage his estates and reduce expenses. This must have shocked Florentine society: except for hunting excursions, owners rarely visited their estates, instead leaving the fattori to oversee their property and the mezzadri in all respects. Known as the Iron Baron for his strong will, Ricasoli directly supervised his fattori (one for each fattoria) and through them the mezzadri on all the poderi on his lands. In this way, he broke through many of the inefficient and unregulated practices that had developed within the mezzadria system. He so believed in this system that in the mid-nineteenth century he introduced it on family property in the Maremma,52 the main area beside Pisa in Tuscany where it was not common.53 Ricasoli focused on more than just grapes and wine. His lands had many other crops, such as olives and wheat. He also pioneered the growing of tobacco in Tuscany.54 Because the land at Terranuova was less suitable for wine grapes or olive oil production, he focused on raising silkworms (through the planting of mulberry trees) there.55 Ricasoli’s direct management of his fattorie had profitable results. From 1840 to 1870 the agrarian income increased almost 75 percent at Brolio and more than 100 percent at Terranuova.56
Ricasoli steered a course between respecting tradition and Tuscan culture and making improvements grounded in scientific study and experimentation. From 1840 to 1847 he noted in a personal diary what was happening in both the vineyard and the winery at Brolio.57 In 1840 he began to grow different vine varieties separately and to make experimental vinifications of each to understand their individual characteristics.58 He emphasized the low training of staked vines, a practice well known to produce higher-quality wines, and the establishment of a consistent identity for Chianti wine. His working notes evidence that he understood the physiology of vine growth, including how to control the energy of the plant throughout its growing cycle. During vinifications, he was in frequent contact with his friend Cesare Studiati, a professor at the University of Pisa who was trained in the chemical analysis of grapes, must, and wine. In contrast with the traditional Tuscan practice of open vat fermentation and skin contact lasting weeks, as of 1848 Ricasoli preferred fermenting in sealed vats and five to six days of skin contact.59 Most important, he made the then-revolutionary decision to base his “recipe” for Chianti on Sangiovese, considered a minor variety (behind Canaiolo) in the Chianti blend. He retained Canaiolo to soften Sangiovese’s harder edge, but in a smaller proportion. For a lighter, everyday Chianti, he prescribed adding a small proportion of the white Malvasia.60 In subsequent years, Tuscan producers adopted this adjustment. In addition, they increasingly substituted the easier to grow, less aromatic, and less easily oxidized Trebbiano for Malvasia. Their rendition of the “Ricasoli” recipe was a mischaracterization of Ricasoli’s formula.
While intensively engaged in improving his estates’ agricultural production, Ricasoli set out to learn more about French winemaking. In 1844 he took his family to the French Industrial Exposition in Paris. During this stay in France, he briefly toured Burgundy and Bordeaux to learn firsthand about French viticulture and vinification.61 In the autumn of 1851 he visited more vineyards and wineries in Bordeaux, Beaujolais, Burgundy, and Languedoc. The significance of this journey to Ricasoli’s evolution as a winegrower cannot be overestimated. Before the end of this trip, he wrote to his brother Vincenzo about the importance of his travels to France’s prized winemaking zones, “I am truly satisfied to have done it, but mortified for having done it so late; I have lost almost 20 years; it will take at least another ten [years] to see the resulting new products from the knowledge which I have acquired.”62 Ricasoli kept notes of his visits and experiments until 1876.63
After the death of Camillo Benso di Cavour, Italy’s first prime minister, Ricasoli became the prime minister, from 1861 to 1862 and then again from 1866 to 1867. Despite his increasing political activity, he never forgot his goal of making Castello di Brolio a wine noted internationally for its quality. He began experiments similar to those conducted by Ricci in 1824 to test the durability of his wines during transport. In 1868 he sent five small barrels to South America. The wine was sent back to him in 1870. He sampled it and found that, on the whole, it had returned in good condition.64 Observations about Ricasoli and his wines after 1870 show his singular impact on the Italian wine world, not just Tuscany. Though many producers in Italy indiscriminately used the label Chianti, there was special reverence for Ricasoli and his Brolio Chianti. This wine was packaged in a Bordeaux-style bottle, not the traditional straw-covered glass flask widely associated with Tuscan wine. Ricasoli’s wines frequently won awards in competitions in Italy, such as at Siena in 1870, Rome in 1876, and Turin in 1877. At the Rome wine competition, Augusto Fortuna, the president of the Section of Viticulture and Enology of a provincial agricultural commission and a published author on the subject, justified the award of the gold medal to the Brolio Chianti of Baron Ricasoli because the quality of the three vintages submitted (1864, 1866, and 1873) increased with bottle age.65 The Ricasoli company even entered wines in the Midwinter Fair held in San Francisco in the winter of 1893–94, winning a gold medal in the category of Italian wines.66 A few other estate owners from the Chianti area also received recognition for their wines. Ferdinando Strozzi’s 1867 Fattoria di Vistarenni (Gaiole) won at the 1870 Fiera Italiana di Prodotti Agrari e Industriali (Italian fair for agrarian and industrial products) held in Florence. His 1865 vintage was awarded a medal at the Esposizione Provinciale Senese di Arti Belle, Industrie e Agraria (Sienese provincial exposition on the fine, industrial and agrarian arts) in Siena, August 1870. Giovanni Camaiori of Tenuta di Arceno, at Castelnuovo Berardenga in the present denominazione di origine controllata e garantita (DOCG) of Chianti Classico, won in Siena with his 1868 wine. Ricasoli also received numerous awards at the Siena event. It is telling that owners of estates in or close to what was considered historic Chianti refrained from calling their wines Chianti but used the names of their own estates in such competitions. In the Vienna Exhibition of 1873, Henry Vizetelly, a British publisher and wine writer, described Ricasoli’s Brolio Chianti as follows: “The best specimens of Tuscan wine submitted to the jury were the Chianti of Baron Ricasoli, from his Brolio vineyards in the vicinity of Sienna, and to whom a medal for progress was awarded. . . . The veritable wine, which possesses remarkable finesse and an agreeable subacidity, is not unlike the best Beaujolais growths with, however, more colour, body, and force. Chianti is in its prime in its fifth or sixth year, but can be drunk when from two to three years old.”67 Vizetelly used the adjective veritable to identify Brolio as true Chianti, as distinct from the many other versions of “Chianti” he encountered.
A report for the United States government on the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris succinctly described the late nineteenth-century view of Chianti: “It is necessary to go [to Chianti] to drink it, . . . both white and red, for, owing to defects of manufacture, they do not bear transportation well. The best of these wines are the Chiantis of Broglio, near Siena, for which reason wine dealers generally call all Tuscan wines ‘Chianti.’”68 Referring to this mischaracterization, Vizetelly mentioned, “In this part of Italy as elsewhere there is a great tendency to extend to a whole region the name of the produce of some favoured locality, and in the same manner as almost every glass of good wine from Piedmont is described as Barolo, so every flask of a superior kind in the ancient duchy of the Medici goes by the name Chianti.”69 Subsequent reports consistently made the same observation. For example, thirty years later a British parliamentary report noted, “The general type of [Tuscan] wine is the so-called ‘vino da pasto’ or table wine, usually known and sold throughout Italy under the name of Chianti, though not produced in Chianti.”70 It was also common for Italian merchants to export wine identified by the vague description vino all’uso di Chianti (wine in the style of Chianti). As a result, by the late nineteenth century Chianti had a clouded reputation in Europe and the United States.
Though Ricasoli was internationally recognized for his role in the development of Chianti wines, and though his wines fared well in national and international competitions, he struggled to achieve success in export markets, principally the English market. In April 1847, he expressed his regrets to his younger brother Vincenzo for not being able to attend a luncheon given in honor of a well-known Englishman. In that note, he mentioned both his attachment to Brolio wine and his desire to see it on dinner tables in England. Ricasoli recognized that England was the most sophisticated wine market in the world and that its merchants controlled the wine trade. Italian wines in this period had minimal presence in the English market, which preferred all qualities of French wine and inexpensive Spanish and Portuguese wine. Ricasoli had sent his wines to England in 1863 and 1864, and in 1865 to Prussia, the United States, and England again. These attempts to establish a presence in foreign markets had limited success.71 On the morning of the day he died, October 23, 1880, he wrote a letter to a well-known Italian exporter offering to sell him his highest-quality wines, in the hope that they would gain the attention of English connoisseurs.72
Ricasoli’s grandson Giovanni Ricasoli Firidolfi, through marriage at the beginning of the twentieth century, reunited three branches of the Ricasoli-Firidolfi family that had been separate since the twelfth.73 Because of this reunification, the Ricasoli farms as of 1909 encompassed seven fattorie: Brolio, Castagnoli, Meleto, Cacchiano, Spaltenna, San Giusto alle Monache, and San Polo.74 Their surface area was an enormous six thousand hectares (14,826 acres, or thirty-nine square miles),75 roughly the size of the modern-day township of Gaiole. The Ricasoli-Firidolfis built a vast wine cellar, with a capacity of twenty thousand hectoliters (528,344 gallons).76 Their wines continued to win recognition in international competitions. Brolio Castle and its wine were recognized as the standard-bearers of true Chianti well into the twentieth century.