3

THE BIRTH OF CHIANTI CLASSICO AND EXTERNAL CHIANTI

The 1870s to 1945

COMMERCIALIZING “CHIANTI”

During the same period when Bettino Ricasoli was putting Brolio and quality Chianti wine on the enological map, the wine merchants of Florence and Tuscany were beginning to industrialize the production and commercialization of red wine branded as Chianti in Italy and abroad. In contrast with the genuine Chianti estates Vistarenni and Arceno (in Gaiole and Castelnuovo Berardenga, respectively), which had used their estate names rather than Chianti on their wine competition submissions in 1870, this new breed of merchant uniformly adopted the name Chianti for mass-market value red wine. The Melini family of Florence, with property near Pontassieve to the east of Florence and north of the Arno River, was already well established in the wine business. During the eighteenth century it had produced vermiglio, which it sold in barrels. In 1860, Adolfo Laborel Melini began to use the new flasks (fiaschi, the plural of fiasco) that the glassmaker Paolo Carrai had invented.1 They were flat bottomed and fabricated with a mold instead of being hand blown. This made it possible to mass-produce glass flasks. In addition, the use of stronger glass cut down on breakages. Before 1860, the Melini’s company had sold most of its wine locally. Soon after it developed the stamped-glass fiasco, it began exporting the mass-produced flasks filled with wine labeled as Chianti. These were still wrapped in the traditional sala (reed) that is indigenous to the Elsa and Arno River Valleys. The flask dressers (fiascaie) who covered each glass flask with reed were peasant women who took in this piecework to earn a little spiccioli (change) from home.² Each flask, once filled with wine, was “sealed” with a layer of olive oil and then a piece of parchment secured with a long woven string of reed. The flask maintained the potbellied profile and hand-woven reed basket of the classic fiasco toscano (which dated from the fourteenth century). By 1877 the glass of the neck had been reinforced, enabling assembly-line machines to insert corks. The Florence Chamber of Commerce in 1877 awarded the Melini company for “having set up and established the most extensive and assured commercial network for Tuscan wine in foreign markets.”3

The use of the name Chianti on wines submitted to competitions and exhibitions became common after 1880. After winning awards at the Milan Exhibitions of 1881 and 1894, Melini’s “Chianti” went global. Competing in exhibitions from Melbourne and London to San Francisco and Buenos Aires, the company aggressively extended the Chianti brand internationally. It even had an importer in Boston by 1889. The branding power of the fiasco helped Melini extend its reach into these foreign markets. But it was not alone. Unlike Coca-Cola’s distinctively shaped glass bottle, the Melini flask was not a unique package protected as a form of “trade dress” under national or international trademark laws. It was an improved version of the generic Tuscan (soon to be Italian) fiasco. As a result, any Italian or other wine company was free to use the flask as packaging, and many did. The I.L. Ruffino firm (the initials being those of the cousins Ilario and Leopoldo Ruffino) was registered in 1877 with offices in Florence and cellars at Pontassieve (like Melini). By the late 1890s it had earned its share of international medals and awards for its Pontassieve “Chianti.” In addition, it went upmarket with a Riserva Ducale “Chianti” in a Bordeaux-style bottle. The explosion of Melini’s and Ruffino’s exports in the international marketplace made Chianti’s transition from a place wine linked to the actual territory to a wine made in the territory’s style irreversible from both a commercial and a political point of view. Other Tuscan and Italian wine merchants (virtually all on major railways or other transport routes) followed suit and adopted the fiasco as their “Chianti” calling card, including Toscanelli e Cassuto (Pisa), Raffaello Caselli (Rufina), Emilio Prosperi (Florence), and F. Nencioni (Pisa). By the end of the nineteenth century, California wine producers were making Californian “Chianti.”⁴ Italian emigrants and foreign customers did not need to read the labels on these flasks to understand that this was “Chianti” wine.

THE ANTINORI FAMILY AND SAN CASCIANO

The Antinori family is the oldest surviving Tuscan wine merchant family in Florence. In 1850 it bought several properties, including forty-seven hectares (120 acres) at Tignanello in Tavarnelle Val di Pesa. Sourcing grapes from its estate vineyards just northwest of the traditional Chianti region, the family had closer ties than Melini or Ruffino to the Chianti region (geographically and commercially). However, a diploma that the Antinori family received at the 1873 Vienna World Fair does not indicate whether the word Chianti was on the label of their prized wine. By the late nineteenth century, they owned the Poggio Torselli, Casa Vecchia, and Cigliano fattorie in San Casciano Val di Pesa. In 1895 the brothers Lodovico and Piero Antinori and their stepbrother Guglielmo Guerrini established the firm that officially became Marchesi L. and P. Antinori in 1898. By the end of the nineteenth century it was exporting wines to New York, London, Paris, Buenos Aires, and San Paolo. In 1898 the company built cellars at San Casciano near its Cigliano fattoria. They began operation in 1900. They were enormous for their day, with a capacity of eight to ten thousand hectoliters (211,337 to 264,172 gallons), and were outfitted with the latest vinification equipment. Because of the quality of its wines, its responsible business practices, and its noble origins, the Antinori family was well positioned to commercialize its wines. The Antinori firm was the official vendor to the royal house of the king of Italy, the duke of Aosta, the duke of Apulia, and foreign kings.5

CHIANTI REMAINS A FRONTIER

The structure of the wine trade in Chianti remained largely unchanged until the 1950s. Merchants (mercanti, the plural of mercante) bought wine from the large fattorie that did not bottle or commercialize their own. There were also examples during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of mezzadri families who sold the wine they made (from their portion of the harvest) to merchants, through local agents. These merchants owned large cellars, where they amassed their purchased wine for sale. Because Tuscany had such a large per capita consumption of wine, most of these merchants were in Florence and sold their wine locally. Those involved in exporting wine, on the other hand, were in the port town of Livorno. Mediatori (the plural of mediatore) were the agents who facilitated the transactions between the fattorie (or the poderi that sold their wine) and the merchants. They were directly involved in the negotiations between sellers and buyers, which focused on tasting and pricing. The mediatori knew the wine’s availability, pricing, style, and quality, as well as the integrity of the participants. At the request of a merchant, one would bring various wine samples at multiple price points to his attention. The mediatore collected these either directly from fattorie or poderi or in the two wine markets held each week in the vicinity of Chianti. Siena’s market day was Wednesday. The most important market occurred on Fridays in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio. The mediatori had to know many fattori and mercanti, and for their efforts they typically received a commission on the sale price from the purchaser.⁶

The farm overseers, or fattori, from throughout Chianti attended Florence’s Friday market to gauge what was happening in the wine market and to contact mediatori about their fattorie’s pending wine business. While in Florence, a fattore would be required to meet with his padrone’s administrator (amministratore), who kept track of the financial performance of the landowner’s various fattorie and was also called the maestro di casa, or master of the house.⁷ For many a fattore, accounting to the amministratore must have been the one time each week when he no longer felt like the lord of the manor. The bachelor fattore was permitted a weekly meal at one of Florence’s trattorias and, by some accounts, a weekly visit to one of the city’s bordellos. By the late nineteenth century, the classic Tuscan mezzadria system was tutto organizzato!

Because there were no navigable rivers from Chianti to Florence, wine continued to be transported between them by wagon in the late nineteenth century. These wagons had to negotiate torturously winding dirt roads and paths up and down steep hills. Each carried about one to two hectoliters (26.4 to 52.8 gallons) of wine. If the wine was sold to merchants for further blending, then it would be delivered to them in barrel. If it was sold to a purveyor who could sell it directly, then it was more likely to be transported in fiaschi. The traditional barrel volume was 45.58 liters (twelve gallons). A fiasco contained about 2.27 liters (2.4 quarts).8 Barrocci (the plural of barroccio) were wagons piled high with fiaschi artfully bound together to create a pyramid of wine. They carried from six hundred to eight hundred bottles. The striking appearance of these carts helped attract attention and sales.

Before the 1800s, most of the roads in Chianti had moved along ridges, linking hill towns. During the nineteenth century, wider and more level roads were built in the valleys. In 1843, through the efforts of Bettino Ricasoli, a road called the Chiantigiana was constructed.⁹ It linked Gaiole, through Radda and then Greve, to Florence in the north. It did not include that part of today’s Strada Regionale 222 (Nuova Chiantigiana) which runs south from Panzano to Siena through Castellina. In contrast, the old, or vecchia, Chiantigiana connected the area of historic Chianti in Gaiole where the Barone Ricasoli estate is located to Siena in the south via Pianella.¹⁰ Turning to the east off the old Chiantigiana at Gaiole, a road led through the Chianti Mountains to the market town of Montevarchi in Valdarno di Sopra, near where the Ricasoli family had its ancestral roots. Bigger roads (i.e., easier transport routes) from Montevarchi running north along the Arno River connected Valdarno di Sopra to Florence.

By 1850 a railway connected Siena to Poggibonsi and Empoli. In the 1860s, another railroad linked Pontassieve (the headquarters of both the Melini and the Ruffino wine companies) to Florence and Rome. These lines were soon tied to the major port for Tuscany, Livorno. It is no accident that the commercialization of Chianti-branded wine began at railroad junctions such as Pontassieve and Poggibonsi, which directly served major urban markets and seaports. A web of lines quickly linked these railroads to other major Italian cities. By the mid-1880s the Fréjus tunnel to France and the St. Gotthard tunnel to Switzerland allowed trains carrying freight to reach the major cities of Europe. Like the principal north-south and east-west roadways of ancient Rome, the major rail lines all bypassed Chianti. During the 1890s, minor internal railroads began to be constructed in Tuscany, rendering considerable savings for the transport of goods.¹¹ Two steam-powered small tramway lines called the Tranvia del Chianti linked Florence directly to San Casciano and Greve in Chianti. Its Florence station was also on the Strada Ferrata Aretina (Arezzo railway line), the main railroad joining Florence to both Milan and Rome. The Tranvia line to San Casciano became fully operational in 1891, the line to Greve in 1893. Piero Antinori, the current head of the Marchesi Antinori company, has conducted research in the municipal archives of San Casciano. It has revealed that one of the principal motivations for the Tranvia service was promoting the commerce of Chianti wine, “linked primarily to the Antinori family.” The Antinori wine company’s decision to construct its massive cellars in San Casciano in 1898 was likely based on the completion of this tramway. The Tranvia also must have been a stimulus for the construction of a large wine cellar in Greve in 1893. In 1906, this cellar became the home of the Unione Produttori Vino Chianti (UPVC). Its members, large fattorie in Greve such as Uzzano, Tizzano, Calcinaia, and Vignamaggio, used the cellar to facilitate the logistics of bottling and the commercialization of Chianti wine.12 The worldwide boom in Chianti flask sales (and the absence of powerful wine merchants in Chianti itself) attracted Piedmontese merchants to Greve. In 1913, Conti Mirafiori of Alba, the owner of Fontanafredda in Barbaresco, bought the UPVC cellar, which became Cantine Mirafiori, only to sell it in 1932 to Fratelli Gancia of Canelli, a Piedmontese producer of sparkling wine.

Though the Tranvia del Chianti was intended to carry both people and freight, most extant photographs of it show small cars transporting people. Only a few capture a flat car carrying freight, probably merchandise, covered by a tarpaulin. The tracks of the tramway lines likely were too narrow for the transport of substantial freight. They also would not have allowed the direct transfer of freight cars to the wider Strada Ferrata Aretina. In 1896, Porta alla Croce, the Florence station near Piazza Beccaria, where the Tranvia del Chianti had met the Strada Ferrata Aretina, was demolished. The Strada Ferrata Aretina moved its terminal to the present main railway station at Campo di Marte, becoming part of the massive Ferrovia Centrale Toscana (Central Tuscan railroad) and leaving the Tranvia del Chianti (whose remaining Florence stop was eight kilometers—five miles—away at Porta Romana to the south of the Arno River) cut off from any junction with major freight routes. These factors and the subsequent growth in the use of trucks, buses, and automobiles led to the discontinuation of the Tranvia del Chianti in 1935.

And so, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a vast railroad network was built to carry heavy freight and merchandise from Tuscany to ports throughout Italy and to European overland destinations, Chianti remained a hinterland. Without any railway stations for loading wine within Chianti, merchants outside the region came to dominate the trade of Chianti-branded wine. At the same time, large landholders in Chianti, instead of bottling and commercializing their own wine under the name Chianti, sold it to these outside merchants, effectively allowing them to control Chianti’s fate. This destroyed Chianti as a meaningful origin for wine and encouraged the perception that “Chianti” was only a wine type that emanated from merchant houses throughout Tuscany.

Given the distance of the Barone Ricasoli firm from major roadways and railroads, it is remarkable how dominant this company was from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s. Ricasoli wines had to travel by either wagon or, as they developed more in the beginning of the twentieth century, lorry to railroad hubs where freight could be loaded onto trains. It took the efforts of an iron-willed baron to bring quality Chianti wine to the larger world. Chianti would have benefited if other noble and mercantile landowners had followed his example.

THE “CHIANTI” LABEL EXPANDS

From at least the seventeenth century, Tuscan merchants (undoubtedly like those in other places) blended wines to the point where their place-names in commerce were not reliable. France’s phylloxera crisis of the late nineteenth century created new commercial opportunities for this practice. From 1880 to 1887, the vine louse called phylloxera ravaged French vineyards, so French merchants looking for wine went to Italy. Most of what they purchased came from Sicily and Apulia. It tended to be freshly vinified wine or juice in vinification, which they finished in their French cellars. During this period, British merchants went to Italy for finished wine. Tuscan merchants sold them bulk wines in barrel that were not from Chianti but were identified as “vino all’uso di Chianti” (wine in the style of Chianti). After 1887, the French wine industry’s recovery reduced this British trade considerably. During the late nineteenth century, a variant of vino all’uso di Chianti began to appear on the labels of wine bottled in the traditional flask. The generic phrase vino tipo di Chianti (wine of the Chianti type) was frequently employed in competition listings as a means of classifying wines according to style. Tuscan and other Italian wine merchants increasingly used the descriptor tipo, a root of the word tipico (typical), to signal that their wines made no claim to a specific place of origin but had been adjusted in the cellar to match the appearance and flavor parameters of established wine styles—in this case, the style associated with Chianti wines made in that territory. It is easy to imagine that after several years of usage, the words vino tipo di would be conveniently omitted, completing the devolution of Chianti from the name of the red wine made in that region to the name of a red wine made anywhere in Tuscany in the style of Chianti.

The “Chianti” tidal wave overwhelmed another of Tuscany’s most promising wines of place. During the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon to see wines from the area of Rufina (east of Florence and bordering Pontassieve) labeled as Rufina in competitions. Giuseppe Liccioli, the owner of Poggio Reale, in particular, won prestigious medals for his Pomino Rufina Rosso.13 At the 1896 Esposizione Vinicola Italiana in Buenos Aires, Paolo Tilli also labeled his wine as Rufina. Wines so labeled were frequently seen on the lists of medal winners at competitions early in the twentieth century as well. However, following the commercial success of powerful wine merchants like the Melini and Ruffino firms, attitudes toward labeling and place of origin began to change in Rufina. At the 1894 Esposizione di Milano, Raffaello Caselli, a merchant with offices in Rome and facilities at Pontassieve, won an award for a wine labeled Rufina, but at foreign venues he presented his wines with the name Chianti.¹⁴ The devolution of Rufina as an important place of origin had begun. Beyond Rufina, the embrace of the “Chianti” brand on labels was even more accelerated. At the same 1894 Milan Exposition, merchants from less well-known wine zones in Tuscany entered their wines as “Chianti,” such as Arturo Bindi from Sesto Fiorentino and Enrico Cogliati from Empoli.15

In a commercial manual for merchants of genuine Chianti wine published in 1909, the author, Torquato Guarducci, provided a blunt assessment of the then-current (and dismal) state of affairs: “Consider now that it has almost become universal in Tuscany to resort to using the name of Chianti to give value to a wine’s production and to facilitate its sale. Neither does it matter if such wines named ‘Chianti’ do not have much body, finesse, and aroma, as would genuine Chianti; it does not matter (I mean) to speculators [merchants]. They just use the name as a passport or calling card for wines that are very often mediocre or common, for wines that they want to sell off.”¹⁶ By this time, however, the problem was national. “Chianti” was being made in Naples, Genoa, Sicily, and everywhere else in Italy. By some estimates, at the beginning of the twentieth century more than half of Italy’s wine production was being sold “by use of this classic name” of Chianti, even though it had “little in common with the genuine article.”¹⁷ This fact was not lost on important export markets. Switzerland, Italy’s most important export market for wine in the mid-to-late 1920s, was a particularly sensitive barometer of the misuse of the word Chianti on labels and in bulk transactions between merchants. In the early twentieth century, there were eighty companies selling “Chianti” in Switzerland.¹⁸ Swiss journalists cited the unethical nature of this trade. Hoteliers and merchants were equally aggrieved. The Cantonal Chemical Laboratory of Fribourg stated in a letter dated June 4, 1926, to the director of the first consortium of Chianti producers (formed in 1924), “This system of giving the name of Chianti to any of the wines of Tuscany deceives the consumer and harms the reputation of Chianti.”¹⁹ In a sentence handed down that year, a Swiss judge in the criminal division of the Bern Supreme Court found the defendant wine merchant guilty of “having marketed Italian red wine under the name of Chianti, contrary to the truth and to cause deception.” While the court heard expert testimony that “wine produced in the classic Chianti zone—including the townships of Gaiole, Castellina, Radda and Greve” was not the only wine called Chianti in the trade, the judge held that the wine in question had no right to use the Chianti denomination under applicable Swiss law.²⁰ Swiss jurisprudence, however, had almost no impact on the Italian wine merchants selling false Chianti.

In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, by contrast, Italian wine had yet to make great inroads. “Chianti,” Marsala, Moscato d’Asti, Barbera, and Vermouth were the first types to insert themselves into the market.²¹ The power of the name Chianti had become so clear in the U.S. market that California producers incorporated it in their own branding. In the early 1900s, the Italian Swiss Colony winery became a major producer of California table wine. One of its most popular brands was labeled Tipo Chianti and came in a flask.²² In California, wines labeled Tipo di Chianti fetched higher prices than Italian Chianti (whether real or just branded “Chianti”), whose reputation (regardless of its provenance) illegal blending and other types of tampering had already tarnished.²³

Did the Italian government or judiciary take any steps to enjoin the use (and inevitable dilution) of the name Chianti by anyone (anywhere)? Within Italy there was little official resistance to the name’s expanded use, because the sheer volume of Chianti-branded wine sold nationally and abroad was an important driver of the rapidly developing Italian economy. The “Chianti” flask reached every corner of Italy. Moreover, it had worldwide appeal, which increased with Italian emigration. The business of making wine called Chianti had become a national industry and source of national pride in Italy. The lack of a mercantile hub within Chianti (due in no small measure to the deficit of commercial zeal on the part of its large landowners), the nonexistence of railways and well-built roads suitable for the transport of wine, and the absence of any legal definition of Chianti as a geographic zone permitted the misappropriation of its name by powerful merchant firms surrounding the territory. Why would they source higher-quality, more expensive, and difficult-to-transport wine from within Chianti when they could get cheaper wine from elsewhere to blend in their cellars to approximate the flavor of real Chianti? The commercial producers of Chianti-branded wine knew their market. Their customers sought a light, inexpensive wine bottled in a fiasco. Most did not know that Chianti was a place. These merchants created a sizable market for the wine grapes of Tuscany’s fattorie and poderi and, in so doing, helped to keep the mezzadria system alive. They came to power at a time when socialist and communist sentiments in northern Italy and continental Europe were on the rise, sentiments that threatened the stability of an agricultural system which had supported the large landholders of Tuscany for centuries. Thus, in Italy’s fledgling democracy, the merchant trade that made “Chianti” developed enormous political power at both the regional and the national level. There remained proud winegrowers in the Chianti region (be they landowners or sharecroppers), but they lacked any such political or commercial power. However, their rightful claims to the name Chianti for both the territory and its wine were not silenced for long.

FRANCE PURSUES PLACE OF ORIGIN PROTECTION

The misleading use of place-names was just one of the issues facing European nations engaging in international trade in the late nineteenth century. A larger concern was the defense of trademarks, trade names, and the brands that they were designed to protect. In 1883, France hosted delegates from ten other countries, including Italy, at a conference that resulted in the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. Article 1 recognizes “indications of source or appellations of origin” as a class of industrial property rights that should be legally protected. Article 10 indicates that products bearing “false indication of source,” a term that is construed to include appellations of origin, are subject to seizure.24 The Madrid Agreement for the Repression of False or Deceptive Indications of Source on Goods of 1891 evolved out of Article 19 of the Paris Convention, which reserves “to the countries of the Union . . . the right to make separately between themselves special agreements for the protection of industrial property.”²⁵ Article 4 of the Madrid Agreement singles out for protection “regional appellations concerning the source of products of the vine.”26 Tellingly, Italy was not a signatory to the provisions of the Madrid Agreement regarding “indications of source” until 1951.

The pressure to protect place-names was particularly strong in France, which had been rocked by pervasive wine fraud in the wake of the phylloxera infestation. This fraud involved mislabeling, which effectively misappropriated the reputations that various French regions had developed for quality wine. A systematic effort to address the problem began with a French statute of August 1, 1905.²⁷ Article 1 prescribed punishments for deception in the use of place-names. A French executive decree of September 3, 1907, which prescribed regulations to enforce the 1905 statute, specifically protected the place-names of French wine. Frank H. Mason, the U.S. consul general in Paris, explained to Congress in 1908 that the aim of the French law was to suppress the production and sale of falsified wines, liqueurs, and other alimentary products. In his report, he translated relevant sections that expressly “provide for the absolute protection of the recognized and established names of wines, based on the chateau, vineyard, or district from which they are derived.”²⁸

A French law of May 6, 1919, replaced the law of 1905. Besides presenting a more complex means of determining place of origin, it shifted the decision-making power from administrative bodies to judicial ones. In addition, the law stipulated that “usages locaux, loyaux et constants” (“local, honest and constant usage[s]”) were to be integrated into appellation identification.²⁹ In 1924, Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié created the Syndicat des Vignerons de Châteauneuf-du-Pape (Winegrowers association of Châteauneuf-du-Pape). Its members adhered to self-imposed regulations on production protocols such as alcohol content and yield limits. Le Roy de Boiseaumarié skillfully used the judicial process to obtain a legally defined and delimited appellation for Châteauneuf-du-Pape. This became a model for the French law of July 22, 1927, that officially integrated quality control regulations within the legal definitions of appellations, leading to the sweeping law of July 30, 1935, that set up France’s system of appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC). At least in France, the culture of wine was evolving to protect place of origin.

WILL TUSCANS HONOR PLACE OF ORIGIN?

In 1883 the Comizio Agrario di Siena (Agrarian assembly of Siena) took steps to organize a Cantina Sociale Senese (Sienese cooperative winery), which would address the need for a defined and consistent product (tipo costante) named Chianti, suitable for export. The Comizio Agrario described the objective as providing a more efficient boost to the “exportation of wine from an extended zone of the province [Siena] already known and sought after at home and abroad under the name ‘Chianti.’” The mention of “an extended zone” aligned the Comizio Agrario with the commercial realities of that period, particularly the use of the name Chianti for red wines made in the style of Chianti regardless of provenance. Since the unification of Italy in 1861, the Province of Siena has encompassed not only the traditional region of Chianti but also most of the Elsa River Valley (including the town of Poggibonsi, where important “Chianti” merchants were headquartered). At this stage, the Comizio Agrario was not focused on delimiting the region of Chianti too narrowly. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the New York Chamber of Commerce sent it a letter denouncing the gross abuses in the trade of “Chianti” wine and proposing that the exporters of “true Chianti” affix a seal to their fiaschi to prevent tampering. This letter provoked the leading agrarian organizations of both Siena and Florence to act. In 1903 the Comizio Agrario and Cattedra Ambulante (Agrarian field school) of each of Siena and Florence together established a committee to create a Sindacato Enologico Chiantigiano (Chianti enological association) to protect the denomination Vino del Chianti (Wine of Chianti) with a special brand or more effective means, “according to the law on the protection of industrial property rights.” The organizers of this effort (including each city’s mayor and chamber of commerce) expressly recognized that it would require them to define the region of Chianti as comprising areas within the provinces of both Florence and Siena. They unanimously approved a delimitation of the zone to include the five townships of Greve, Radda, Gaiole, Castellina, and Castelnuovo Berardenga. They also proposed a technical committee to assess whether wine producers in “neighboring areas” would be permitted to join the Sindacato Enologico Chiantigiano if their wines met its standards.30 It was a promising start for the protection of Chianti as a distinct place of wine origin.

In the protection of place of wine origin, Italy’s Piedmont region had made the first move. The Sindacato Vinicolo Piemontese (Piedmontese winegrowers association), the first consortium of producers whose mission was to defend the regional appellations of Piedmont, was created in 1902.³¹ In 1909 Italy’s Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce organized a convention at Alba in Piedmont to discuss the protection of denominations of origin. It resulted in a recommendation that the Italian national government create a commission to study the delimitation of wine regions. This intensified the debate in Tuscany over the delimitation of the Chianti region.³² Chiantigiani began to mobilize in Greve. Italo De Lucchi, then the mayor of Greve, was concerned about how the wine trade was fraudulently using the name Chianti. Though he had failed to put together a delegation to attend the meeting in Alba, in subsequent months he created the Commissione per la Tutela del Chianti (Commision for the protection of Chianti), which he headed and which met at Greve in December 1909 and February 1910. Its Chiantigiani members maintained that Poggibonsi producers should be prohibited from using the word Chianti on their labels and excluded them from these meetings. Giulio Brini, an attorney representing the Poggibonsi producers, published an article in March 1910 rebutting the Chiantigiani. He argued that wines labeled Chianti from the historic Chianti territory did not have a consistent style, and he proposed that “Chianti” be a generic category followed by the name of the township of origin, in his case Poggibonsi.³³

Also in 1910, a committee of representatives of the townships of Greve, Gaiole, Castellina, Radda, and Castelnuovo Berardenga met in Greve to discuss a mark of origin for Chianti wine. Arnaldo Strucchi, the director of the Sindacato Vinicolo Piemontese, also attended. The communal representatives voted to present their case for place protection to the prime minister and the agriculture minister of Italy. Following the meeting, Strucchi sent a letter to Arturo Marescalchi, the founder of the Associazione Enotecnici Italiani (Italian enotechnical association) and one of the most influential voices in the Italian wine industry (including in the halls of the Italian Parliament), forcefully explaining why a legal framework built on enological wine styles (under the label of vini tipici) would be a weak (and unacceptable) substitute for one that provided protection for place of origin:34

Regarding vini tipici, such an approach defeats our efforts to obtain a law that defines the production areas of special renown . . . and instead proposes a measure directed at protecting not a given area that produces a given typical wine, but a given typical wine whatever the location that produces it, as long as it has the characteristics of such typical wine. . . . It is a system that could make it easy for many producers and countries, but I do not believe that it could be recognized by the law of any state, nor could it succeed in being recognized by Italy itself, which has every interest in protecting the place of origin of its own Marsala [and other prestigious products of place in export markets].³⁵

De Lucchi had counted on the support of Sidney Sonnino, the newly elected prime minister of Italy, who had strong ties to Chianti by virtue of his ownership of Vistarenni, a famous villa-fattoria in Gaiole. A delegation of the Commissione per la Tutela del Chianti traveled to Rome later in 1910 to make its case to the Italian government for the protection of Chianti as a place of wine origin. But political changes had weakened Prime Minister Sonnino’s clout, and the Italian government made no decision. World War I deferred the debate until the end of the next decade.³⁶ It appeared that Chianti’s De Lucchi and Piedmont’s Strucchi had both seriously overestimated the wine wisdom of the Italian government.

WHERE TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE PROBLEM

To many merchants and producers of Tuscan wine, the urge to associate their wine with the place, wine, name, and brand of Chianti was irresistible. The fiasco had become an international symbol of Italian red wine, and “Chianti” was the name on the label, an essential selling point for Tuscan wine.

As the place of origin legal debate was taking shape in the first decade of the 1900s, the underlying dispute over the borders of Chianti came out into the open. Notwithstanding the unambiguous (and unanimous) decision in 1903 by senior representatives of the leading agrarian, political, and commercial institutions of Siena and Florence to define the denomination of Chianti as encompassing the five townships of Greve, Radda, Gaiole, Castellina, and Castelnuovo Berardenga, the competing interests for Chianti’s name were marshaling their historical, commercial, and geological forces for the coming Guerra del Chianti. In 1905 Antonio Casabianca published a slim volume titled I confini storici del Chianti (The historic boundaries of Chianti). His thesis was simple, if his subject matter was not: the geographic boundaries of Chianti were identical with the geographic boundaries of the medieval Lega del Chianti. This Chianti storico, or historic version of Chianti, encompassed only the three townships of Radda, Gaiole, and Castellina (and their associated parish churches). The archtraditionalists of Chianti embraced this view. Two years earlier, Edoardo Ottavi and Marescalchi had published a handbook for merchants of wine (Vade-mecum del commerciante di uve e di vini in Italia), in which they had presented a more evolved map of enological Chianti. Their Carta (Map) XVI depicted “Chianti e regioni vicine” (Chianti and nearby regions) as limited in the north by the town of Mercatale in San Casciano, in the west by the towns of Barberino, Poggibonsi, and Monteriggioni, in the south by Bozzone (just north of Siena), and in the east by the towns of the upper Arno River Valley, including San Vincenti, San Gusmè, Montevarchi, and Figline.37 Ottavi and Marescalchi, as leading enologists of this period, showed Chianti as a wine region that encompassed Greve and the part of San Casciano southeast of Mercatale. The growing debate over the borders of Chianti prompted the Georgofili Academy to sponsor a competition in 1906 for a practical manual or handbook (vade-mecum) for the “commerciante di vino nella regione del Chianti” (wine merchant in the region of Chianti). Torquato Guarducci, an engineer by training, won the prize for his manuscript Il Chianti vinicolo (The enological Chianti), which was published in 1909. He found historic support for his expanded delimitation of Chianti in Emanuele Repetti’s encyclopedic Dizionario geografico, fisico e storico della Toscana (Geographic, natural and historical dictionary of Tuscany), which was published in several volumes between 1833 and 1846. Repetti’s definition of “Chianti,” commonly referred to as Chianti geografico, relied on climatic and soil factors as well as historical ones and expressly incorporated the part of Sienese Chianti with Castelnuovo Berardenga and the part of Florentine Chianti with Greve, together with selected areas of Barberino Val d’Elsa and Poggibonsi. In Il Chianti vinicolo Guarducci notably defined Chianti as the area consisting of the township of Greve and extending south to the three historic towns Castellina, Radda, and Gaiole. This delimitation, like that of Ottavi and Marescalchi, included localities in the upper Greve River Valley such as Vicchiomaggio, Querceto, Lucolena, Montefioralle, Panzano, Le Corti, Casole, Lamole, and Stinche, which had been identified with the wines of Chianti since at least the sixteenth century. The only other entrant in this Georgofili competition was Casabianca. His manuscript, a more detailed version of his 1905 volume The Historic Boundaries of Chianti, maintained that enological and historical Chianti (i.e., the Lega) were one and the same. His volume, Guida storica del Chianti, was published in 1908. At least for the informed jury of the Georgofili Academy, Guarducci’s evolved understanding of enological Chianti won the day.

After 1909, the debate over Chianti’s boundaries turned to geology. There was much discussion of an article by Professor Vittorio Racah, the director of the Cattedra Ambulante of Siena, published in that year in Agricoltura senese, in which he proposed geological rationales for identifying the borders of Chianti. Racah’s theory came to be known as Chianti geologico. The primary criterion he specified was that the soil derive from the Eocene epoch. On this basis, he proposed that Chianti included the townships of Greve, Gaiole, and Radda, all but a small section of the township of Castellina, parts of the townships of San Casciano and Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, and small parts of the townships of Barberino Val d’Elsa and Poggibonsi. Racah erroneously included small parts of the towns of Colle and Siena, based on a misunderstanding of their geologic origin.38 His delimitation of Chianti helped to shape its statutory definition by the consortium of Chianti wine producers that was organized after the First World War. The debate over Chianti’s borders was still in its early rounds.

THE MARCH TO VINO TIPICO

The Italian word tipico means “typical.” It derives from tipo, “type.” The concept of vino tipico has a long history in Tuscany, and it has complicated the world of Italian wine, particularly Chianti. While the Piedmontese, perhaps because of their geographic proximity to France, historical connections to the viticultural areas of eastern France, and more sensitive agrarian values, unequivocally supported the concept of the denomination of origin for wine, Tuscans embraced the concept of vino tipico, because of the influence of their strong mercantile traditions and lack of esteem for agriculture. In his Trattato di agricoltura, which he wrote between 1710 and 1719, Domenico Falchini, the fattore of the Medici’s Lappeggi estate south of Florence, revealed how embedded vino tipico was in Tuscan culture. He presented a recipe for making Chianti red wine “in Chianti or in other mountainous places where the season is cool” and put a more generic recipe for Chianti wine under the following caption: “The Method and instruction regarding how to make a fine and ordinary red wine, at your option, as is customary in Chianti [all’usanza di Chianti] and other areas.”³⁹ Falchini’s “all’usanza di Chianti” is a precursor of the “all’uso di Chianti” of late nineteenth-century Tuscan wine merchants, both describing a “Chianti” that looked and tasted like Chianti but was not from Chianti. The phrase “tipo di” was also used in the late nineteenth century, to aggregate wines of a certain style in wine competitions. These descriptors reveal the development of the concept of enological types, wines that are defined not by their place but by how they can mimic place through the application of enological processes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Italy started to develop a legal wine classification system around the construct of vino tipico. By 1910, merchant-producers and politicians had pushed the legal meaning of vino tipico away from the connection to place as a means of expanding the borders of Chianti.

In 1920, following the First World War, Italy’s minister of agriculture appointed a commission, naming Marescalchi as its president, to study the question of legal protection for delimitations of wine origin.⁴⁰ The Italian Parliament finally addressed the topic with its Law 497 of March 7, 1924, titled “Disposizioni per la difesa dei vini tipici” (Provisions for the defense of typical wines).41 Known as the Marescalchi Law, it gave precedence to the concept of wine types, vini tipici, over that of wines from delimited areas. It was the by-product of a four-year legislative odyssey. In a 1925 speech to the newly organized consortium of Chianti wine producers, Marescalchi declared that in the version of the law that his commission had recommended to the Italian Parliament (which he claimed an “interested minister” had changed right before passage), the term vino tipico was based on “the vine variety, the place, the method of production and its permanent character” (italics added).⁴² Notwithstanding this ex post facto characterization, the final draft of the law proposed by Marescalchi’s commission contained no such conjunctive test for the definition of vino tipico. Instead, it incorporated a disjunctive test, stipulating that a vino tipico was based on “the vine variety, the place of production or the methods of production” (italics added).⁴³ In other words, place of origin was not legally an integral requirement of vino tipico, just an optional element. As if this dilution of place were not significant enough, the definition was removed from the final law. In its place was a statement that a subsequent decree would define the “special characteristics” of vini tipici. The flask was kicked farther down the road. At this point, Italian wine legislation clearly diverged from the French model, which emphasized place or zone of origin, to a Tuscan model, which valued enological typicity.

The march to vini tipici had been subtle and insidious. Thirty-five years earlier, Italy had not signed on to the provisions of the Madrid Agreement of 1891 regarding protections of “indications of source,” because it had refused to give up the use of such terms as Champagne and Cognac on Italian wine labels. It could thus not object when California wine producers used the term Chianti for wines made in the United States.⁴⁴ This early refusal to honor French appellation names was a sign of what was to emerge during the 1920s and 1930s in Italy. By failing to recognize place as the primary determinant of a wine’s identity, Italy’s Fascist government (and its many loyal supporters) disfigured the legal framework for protecting place of origin names such as Chianti and sacrificed the interests of grower-bottlers in some of Italy’s most storied wine regions. Italian wine would pay the price.

A BLACK ROOSTER IS BORN

As soon as the text of the Marescalchi Law was published in March 1924, the Chiantigiani fought back. Italo De Lucchi, the former mayor of Greve and founder of the 1909 Commissione per la Tutela del Chianti, was also a grower of wine grapes with a farm in Panzano in Chianti. He understood that the inconclusive nature of the Marescalchi Law opened the door for wine producers outside geographic Chianti to lobby for the legal right to use the name Chianti and therefore that it was imperative for Chiantigiani to create a voluntary association, a consortium that would define, valorize, and protect the territory of Chianti, its winegrowers, and its wine. He resorted to a combination of public relations, marketing, and community activism to mobilize his fellow Chianti winegrowers.

Just two months after the promulgation of the Marescalchi Law, De Lucchi orchestrated a meeting of growers and grower-bottlers on May 14, 1924, in Radda, the historic headquarters of the Lega del Chianti, in the fourteenth-century Palazzo del Podestà (town hall) in the central piazza. Its objective was to create the first-of-its-kind consortium of Chianti winegrowers. In advance of the meeting, De Lucchi had sent out word that the bylaws or articles of the constitution (Statuto) of a new consortium (consorzio) of Chianti growers and merchants would be presented for signature by the founding members, who would agree to be bound by its provisions. He arranged for interested parties to pledge their support by sending notarized letters of their commitment in advance of the meeting. One such grower-bottler was Luigi Ricasoli of Castello di Brolio.

The May 14 organizational meeting of the Consorzio per la Difesa del Vino Tipico del Chianti e della Sua Marca di Origine (Consortium for the defense of the typical wine of Chianti and its mark of origin) was staged at Radda with history in mind. The notary Baldassarre Pianigiani played a central role in the deliberations, as did De Lucchi and Alberto Oliva, a professor of agronomy and Ricasoli’s personal representative at the meeting. In an impassioned but reasoned speech, Oliva explained what was at stake for the Chiantigiani winegrowers:

There is no doubt that Chianti must stake its reputation above all on viticulture, but that will happen only if all together we wage, without illusions, a difficult, long and expensive fight, the only one that in this moment can guarantee to the Chiantigiani a real hope of survival. . . . It is essential to strictly link the fame of the products of Chianti to that of their celebrated territory of production, and in the end we must fight all together, with great energy and resolve, to obtain from our government, as soon as possible, the famous laws that other wine-producing countries already have had in place for some time, in order to enable us to compete fiercely in foreign markets. . . . For this reason, it is imperative now for us to join the battle together and without haste, dedicating all of our force to finally obtain a just law, which governs denominations, forever linking them to the name of their territory of origin.45

After Oliva and De Lucchi finished their speeches, thirty-three winegrowers of Chianti became the charter members of the consortium. Pursuant to Article 1 of the Statuto, all of the produttori (growers) and industriali (merchants) resident within Chianti “classico” (the word classic ultimately came to identify this appellation) were eligible for membership. Article 1 defined “Chianti classico” as encompassing the townships of “Castellina in Chianti, Gaiole in Chianti, Greve, and Radda in Chianti and the hamlets of S. Gusmè and Vagliagli in the township of Castelnuovo Berardenga.”⁴⁶ (The Italian government had permitted the townships of Castellina, Gaiole, and Radda to add the suffix “in Chianti” to their names in 1911 and had rejected Greve’s application to do so in 1913. Greve finally obtained that right in 1972.) Article 2 of the Statuto, however, provided that areas in the vicinity of these townships and hamlets could apply to join if their lands had suitable terrain, exposition, and vine varieties as determined by a technical representative of the consortium.

While Article 4 allowed for both red and white wines, it required that the grapes or must had to come from the listed townships and hamlets. Vinification, maturation, and bottling, therefore, could occur outside “Chianti classico.” This was an accommodation for merchants (both inside and outside Chianti). The grape varieties listed, Sangioveto, Canaiolo, Malvasia, and Trebbiano, were required to be used “in prevalenza” (predominantly), which opened the door for other varieties. Since the vineyards of Chianti had a chaotic mix of varieties, prevalenza was an appropriate and necessary standard. The grapes had to be “cultivated in hilly areas or land in places geologically formed and derived from galestro, alberese, and arenaria” (see ch. 6 for a description of these distinctive rocks of Chianti). The winter after it was founded, in December 1924, the consortium chose as its marca di origine (mark of origin) a black rooster on a field of gold, the emblem of the medieval Lega del Chianti. It filed for trademark protection in March 1925.47 Almost immediately, Tuscans referred to the consortium with the soprannome (nickname) Consorzio del Gallo (Rooster consortium).

The consortium’s first year was fraught with heated internal meetings over the balance of geographical representation on its Consiglio di Amministrazione (Board of directors). The divisions were between certain traditionalists from Castellina, Radda, and Gaiole on the one hand and the representatives from Greve (Grevigiani) on the other hand. There were also internal conflicts about who was in Chianti and who was out. In March 1925 there was an early sign of revolution outside Chianti. The mayor of Poggibonsi, Francesco Brini, issued a report recommending that his township “start selling its products under the denomination Chianti di Poggibonsi.”⁴⁸ He proposed the extension of Chianti to include all townships that contained parts of the Consorzio del Gallo zone. In May 1925 the Consorzio del Gallo decided not to enlarge its statutory definition of the Chianti zone. Interestingly, there is no evidence that it publicly defined its geographic limits by issuing a map indicating its borders at the time of its founding in 1924. Rather, it relied on Articles 1 and 2 of its Statuto, which left the door open to conditional geographic extensions (much as the Comizio Agrario of Siena had done in delimiting Chianti for the purpose of organizing the Sindacato Enologico Chiantigiano in 1903).

THE ROOSTER CROWS

The Consorzio del Gallo made a big impression at the Milan Fair of 1925, which also boosted the sales of its members.⁴⁹ While Ricasoli’s membership conferred prestige on the Consorzio del Gallo, Gino Sarrocchi conferred credibility. Within two months of the consortium’s first meeting, Sarrocchi (one of Italy’s most respected lawyers) had become the minister of public works in Benito Mussolini’s national government. With these early successes, the consortium grew to 189 members within six months of its organization.⁵⁰ After De Lucchi’s two-year term at the helm, Sarrocchi became the president. He and Ricasoli both had high-profile roles within the Fascist Party, which was particularly strong in Florence. This gave the young consortium a loud voice. The Fascist Party presented itself as a force that could lift Italy out of the torpor in which it found itself after the close of World War I. The large landholders of Tuscany almost unanimously looked to it to restore order to Italy and prevent the rise of communism, a force that threatened the mezzadria system, on which their livelihoods and lifestyle depended.

The Consorzio del Gallo’s initial triumphs did not go unnoticed. The merchants of Chianti-branded wine understood that the fledgling consortium of Chiantigiani growers and merchants was intent on securing a legal monopoly on the name Chianti. In July 1925 the producers of San Casciano created their own consortium, the Consorzio per la Difesa del Vino Tipico Chianti di San Casciano Val di Pesa e della Sua Marca di Origine (Consortium for the defense of the typical Chianti wine of San Casciano Val di Pesa and its mark of origin). It argued that there were many distinct “types of Chianti [tipi del Chianti], including Carmignano, Rufina, Pomino, ‘the Pontassieve type, the Nipozzano type, that of Montepulciano, the Elba types.’” The San Casciano winegrowers contended that their land was geologically “not dissimilar in nature from that of the so-called historic Chianti.”51 They also asserted that their wine, which used the same vine varieties and comparable methods of vinification as Chianti, was a typical Chianti “par excellence.”⁵² At the same time, Niccolò Antinori was pursuing alternative strategies for the Marchesi Antinori company and his fellow San Casciano grower-bottlers. One option was securing the inclusion of San Casciano in the Consorzio del Gallo. In October 1926 the office of the Italian minister of the national economy, Giuseppe Belluzzo, mediated an agreement between the two consortia. By another account, Ricasoli and Antinori arranged the deal in an effort to defeat the politically powerful merchant-producers of larger Tuscany, and specifically the Frescobaldi family, according to Gualtiero Armando Nunzi, the president of the Consorzio del Gallo from 1994 to 1997.⁵³ In either case, it allowed producers and farmers from San Casciano into the Consorzio del Gallo, provided their vines grew on soil “composed predominantly of galestro and round alberese stones, but not of sandstone.”⁵⁴ It was a first step toward building the modern Chianti Classico wine region.

A PUTTO CONFRONTS THE ROOSTER

The Consorzio del Gallo soon had a more formidable nemesis. In February 1927 a group of wine merchants, grower-bottlers, and growers principally from Montalbano, Rufina, and the hills south of the city of Florence banded together to form a lobby, named Consorzio del Vino Chianti (Chianti wine consortium). They chose as their trademark a putto, a nude baby boy or cherub often portrayed in Italian mythological and religious art. Their putto was referred to as Bacchino, or “little Bacchus,” which gave rise to the nickname Consorzio del Bacchino. After World War II it was generally known as the Consorzio del Putto. This consortium aggressively promoted the concept that Chianti was a wine style already recognized as distinct by the trade and the public. Its message could not have been clearer: “Chianti is not the name of a wine of a certain zone, namely historic Chianti, but rather the generic name of a certain type of wine. . . . Therefore this denomination must be extended to the wines produced in the zones of San Casciano, Carmignano, Montalbano, Colli Fiorentini, Pomino, Rufina, etc., because they are wines of exquisite finesse and particular organoleptic and commercial characteristics and because they have been marked since time immemorial both locally and abroad with the name Chianti.”55 For this reason, the Consorzio del Putto’s conception of Chianti was characterized as espansionista (expansionist) and estensionista (extentionist). First and foremost, its organizers pleaded the economic case, painting a grim picture. The loss of the Chianti name—and thus access to its worldwide markets—would harm not only Tuscan and other Italian merchants but also countless farmers “who with a truly patriotic spirit [had] contributed, with no small financial sacrifice, to the rapid reconstruction of the vines destroyed by phylloxera.” Like Giulio Brini in 1910, the Consorzio del Putto proposed that the denomination Chianti be prefixed to the geographic place of origin, as in Chianti Rufina or Chianti Carmignano.⁵⁶ These arguments must have been persuasive, inasmuch as within four months of signing their agreement with the Consorzio del Gallo, San Casciano’s winegrowers (including Lodovico Antinori, one of the three founders of the Marchesi Antinori company) became founding members of the Consorzio del Putto and repudiated their relationship with the Black Rooster. This little Bacchus was one tough putto.

While the consortia of the Gallo and the Putto were forming their battle lines, the Ministry of the National Economy promulgated Regulatory Decree (RD) 1440 in June 1927 to implement the March 1924 legislation on vini tipici. This required a consortium identifying itself by a geographic denomination to define the zone of production of its vino tipico, not just the wine’s organoleptic characteristics. In effect, this decree supported the Consorzio del Gallo’s fundamental contention, that place of origin was an essential component of any vino tipico denomination. In September 1927 the Consorzio del Gallo amended its Statuto to revise the delimitation of Chianti to include the entire townships of Castellina in Chianti, Gaiole in Chianti, Greve, and Radda in Chianti, the localities of San Gusmè and Vagliagli in the township of Castelnuovo Berardenga, and sections of the townships of Barberino Val d’Elsa, Poggibonsi, San Casciano Val di Pesa, and Tavarnelle Val di Pesa.⁵⁷ Attached to the amended Statuto was a map of the revised delimitation. To our knowledge, it is the Consorzio del Gallo’s first map of Chianti “classico.” The Consorzio del Putto had a bigger map of Chianti in its back pocket. The legislating and negotiating were just beginning.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

In October 1927, Minister of the National Economy Belluzzo summoned members of the Gallo and Putto consortia to Rome to resolve the Chianti question. The national Fascist government had political and economic interests in reconciling the warring factions in Tuscany and was being pressured to define other appellations nationwide. The Ministry of the National Economy proposed that Tuscany have one consortium to control all of its delimited zones, including Chianti. It would be named Consorzio dei Vini Toscani (Consortium of Tuscan wines). In addition to the consortia representatives, Tommaso Bisi, Belluzzo’s undersecretary, who presided over the meeting, invited mayors who wanted to propose denominations for the Tuscan-wide consortium. Following the meeting, the ministry persevered with its plan for a single regional Tuscan consortium and charged two agrarian federations, one each in Florence and Siena, with the task of defining the “zones of production of Chianti and the other typical Tuscan wines” in accordance with RD 1440 of 1927.58 Unfortunately, their negotiations broke down.

Undeterred, Belluzzo, an engineer, not a politician by training, made an executive decision. In letters signed by Bisi and dated March 9, 1928, the ministry directed the Florentine and Sienese agrarian federations to create the statute for a consortium that would govern the six Tuscan vini tipici: Chianti, Montalbano, Rufina, Colli Fiorentini, Montepulciano, and Montalcino.⁵⁹ These letters stipulated that each vino tipico must respect its geographic denomination.⁶⁰ In other words, the Ministry of the National Economy had rejected the expansionist argument of the Consorzio del Putto based on enological typicity and instead recognized that Chianti and the other named wine types were the products of specific places of origin, each of which should have the exclusive right to the use of its geographic denomination. As a result, the wine zones in the Consorzio del Putto, namely Montalbano, Rufina, and Colli Fiorentini, were required to use their actual names of geographic indication and not “Chianti.” In the absence of an agreement between the agrarian federations regarding the delimitation of the production zone of each vino tipico, the Ministry of the National Economy established general delimitations for them. That of Chianti largely corresponded with the Consorzio del Gallo’s delimitation in its September 1927 Statuto but added a greater area of San Casciano (see map 1).⁶¹

MAP 1

Borders and Administrative Division of the Chianti Zone, from G. Garavini, L’applicazione delle legge sui vini tipici in provincia di Siena (Siena: S. Bernardino, 1929), tav. III.

The ministry’s inclusion of much of western San Casciano in the delimitation of Chianti created consternation among certain leaders of the Consorzio del Gallo, such as Giulio Straccali, who believed that it differed too much from Chianti.⁶² Certainly, the soil satisfied neither Racah’s 1909 definition of Chianti geologico, being of Pliocene origin, nor the description in the Consorzio del Gallo’s 1924 Statuto. This incorporation did, however, encompass the influential Antinori family (consistent with the 1926 agreement between the Consorzio del Gallo and the San Casciano consortium). When the news of San Casciano’s inclusion in Chianti through the intervention of the Ministry of the National Economy reached Niccolò Antinori by telegram from Rome, he was jubilant, according to his son Piero. He wasted little time in launching his flagship Chianti, Villa Antinori, made from grapes grown on the Antinori vineyards in San Casciano. The 1928 vintage proudly sported the black rooster seal.

Having settled the delimitation of Chianti and the other zones, the Ministry of National Economy in its March 9 letters ordered the Florentine and Sienese agrarian federations to respond to its directive to establish a constitution for the Consorzio dei Vini Toscani no later than March 25. While the Sienese federation responded by the due date, the Florentine federation did not.63 This delimitation of the Chianti wine zone then faded away. As of July 1928, both Belluzzo and Bisi were no longer in their posts at the ministry. It does not stretch the imagination to surmise that their March 1928 letters won them few allies in Florence or Rome. The fact that the Florentine federation apparently refused to comply with the ministerial order speaks volumes about the influence of powerful wine merchants in Rome. The Fascist government prided itself on its ability to create order out of chaos. Under its rule, the Italian trains ran on time. However, it had yet to put Chianti squarely on the map.

THE FORNACIARI COMMISSION

Following the intransigence of Florence’s agrarian federation, Italy’s national government reexamined the Chianti question and took new steps to lay the groundwork for an appellation system based on vini tipici. In July 1930, Italian Law 1164 redefined the concept of vino tipico. Article 2 tightened the definition: it is a wine whose special character derives from its place of origin, soil, vine varietal composition, and method of production.64 The law also stipulated that only one consortium could be organized for each vino tipico.⁶⁵ These legal developments gave the Consorzio del Gallo a foundation to hope that its cause was not lost. Later that year a related regulation classified vini tipici to include special wines, such as fortified and sweet wines (including Tuscan vin santo) and fine and superior table wines (vini da pasto). Fine wines had a constant character, while superior wines (the higher category) also acquired special and prestigious features after natural aging.⁶⁶ In January 1931 the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Corporations jointly appointed a technical commission (referred to in these pages as the Fornaciari Commission, after its president, Julo Fornaciari, a deputy in the Italian Parliament) to recommend delimitations of the zone of production of Chianti and of the other Tuscan vini tipici.⁶⁷ Giovanni Dalmasso, the director of the Research Center for Viticulture and Enology at Conegliano in the Veneto, was one of the three other members. As Italy’s most respected academic in the field, he brought instant credibility to the commission and is thought to have been the architect and principal author of its final relazione (report). In August 1932 the Ministry of Agriculture published Per la tutela del vino Chianti e degli altri vini tipici toscani (For the protection of Chianti wine and the other typical Tuscan wines), which reproduced the findings and recommendations of the Fornaciari Commission in its exhaustively researched report (referred to in these pages as the Fornaciari Commission report) and a ministerial decree dated July 31, 1932, on the “delimitation of the production zone of ‘Chianti’ vino tipico.”⁶⁸ The news was not good for the Consorzio del Gallo on any front. Effectively overturning the Ministry of the National Economy’s March 1928 order, the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Corporations’ July 31 decree rejected the Consorzio del Gallo’s central argument, that Chianti should be protected as an individual vino tipico based on its geographic denomination, and instead created a Tuscan-wide Chianti appellation with seven subzones constituting a unified vino tipico zone. Per the recommendation of the Fornaciari Commission, Chianti Classico became one of these subzones. Its delimitation was set forth in the Map of the Production Zones of Typical Tuscan Wines inserted after the last page of the commission’s report in Per la tutela del vino Chianti and largely mirrored the Ministry of the National Economy’s 1928 delimitation of Chianti. In denying the Consorzio del Gallo’s claim to the exclusive use of the name Chianti, the Fornaciari Commission concluded that Chianti was generally a fine wine, in contrast with the superior wines of Montalcino and Montepulciano. Ironically, almost thirty years earlier, two of Italy’s leading enologists, Edoardo Ottavi and Arturo Marescalchi, had classified the Chianti wine from the towns of Radda, Gaiole, and Castellina as superior to the wines of Montepulciano and Montalcino, which had only recently achieved fame.69 The minister of agriculture who (together with the minister of corporations, Benito Mussolini) issued the decree implementing the Fornaciari Commission’s delimitation of Chianti was named Giacomo Acerbo. The Italian word acerbo means “harsh, rough, bitter, tart, sharp” and is often used to describe immature grapes and defective wine. For the Consorzio del Gallo, this minister and his 1932 decree were undoubtedly acerbissimi!

The Fornaciari Commission took into account historical interpretations of Chianti, factors relating to soils, vine varieties, climate, and expositions, and the impacts that its decision would have on the local, regional, and national economies. Its members made extensive visits to viticultural areas, taking soil samples, tasting wines, and interviewing more than two hundred individuals.⁷⁰ The commission observed that there were many ways to delimit Chianti: the historic one (presented by Casabianca), the geographic one (presented by Repetti and then elaborated by Guarducci), the classic one (proposed by the Consorzio del Gallo), and the commercial one (proposed by the Consorzio del Putto). It argued that the classic delimitation had no more validity than any of the others. In fact, the Consorzio del Gallo’s borders had already proved to be elastic, having been revised from those of the original Statuto to include portions of San Casciano, Barberino Val d’Elsa, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, and Poggibonsi. The commission found that the style and quality of wine from within the area defined by the Consorzio del Gallo varied to such a great degree as not to justify a distinct geographic appellation. It also concluded that Chianti was a wine type common to all seven subzones. Furthermore, by extending the name Chianti beyond the confines of the Consorzio del Gallo, it was enabling, if not ensuring, the economic prosperity of a greater number of Tuscans and other Italians.

In addition to Chianti Classico, the Fornaciari Commission report listed the following six subzones (collectively referred to in these pages as External Chianti) to be included in the Chianti appellation: Montalbano, Rufina, Colli Fiorentini, Colli Senesi, Colli Aretini, and Colline Pisane (colli means “hills” and colline “low hills”). The seven subzones spanned five provinces in the region of Tuscany. Several were not even contiguous with the others. One, Colline Pisane, was quite a distance from the others and less than sixteen kilometers (ten miles) from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The six subzones of External Chianti had a volume of wine production more than five times greater than that of the Consorzio del Gallo.71 The Consorzio del Putto had won this decisive battle.

While the Fornaciari Commission did not propose or recommend production disciplines for each of Chianti’s delimited subzones, it did advise the creation of a consortium to unify them under a single governing body. On September 25, 1932, the Consorzio del Gallo met to discuss next steps. Its board feared that the proposed Chianti consortium would appropriate the Black Rooster emblem. As a result, the Consorzio del Gallo set itself up as a private company, in order to obtain the exclusive legal rights to this trademark.⁷² In the fall and winter of 1932 it weighed its legal options to challenge the July 31 ministerial decree. While its board of directors intensely debated filing an appeal with Italy’s Consiglio di Stato (Council of state), the time limit for such an appeal lapsed. So the Consorzio del Gallo instead filed a petition of appeal with Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy.⁷³ Before it could receive any royal justice, however, the Italian Parliament once again changed the legal landscape for controlled appellations for wine. In June 1937, Italian Law 1266 was promulgated to govern viticulture. It defined a new class of vini pregiati di determinata origine (fine wines of specific origin) as a substitute for the vini tipici statutory construct. According to the Consorzio del Gallo’s president from 1927 to 1947, Gino Sarrocchi, and subsequent commentators on Italian wine law, Law 1266 abrogated Law 1164 of 1930 on vini tipici and thereby annulled the 1932 ministerial decree based on it.⁷⁴ The new law also made moot the appeal that the Consorzio del Gallo had filed with the Italian king. Would the patriots of the Consorzio del Gallo have another day to fight for Chianti and its winegrowers? In the decades to follow, the producers and merchants of both Chianti Classico and External Chianti continued to wave Chianti’s flag. But Sarrocchi fought on, arguing that Chianti Classico wine alone deserved to be known by the name, “Chianti del Chianti.”

PHYLLOXERA AND A REAL WAR

After World War I, landowners and mezzadri in Tuscany had faced a common problem: phylloxera. Its spread was slower in Chianti than in other areas of Tuscany, reaching its peak during the 1920s and 1930s. Chianti’s dry and rocky soil helped, since phylloxera tends to prefer more humid, less stony, and more fertile soil. Given the system of mixed agriculture in Chianti, phylloxera affected vines one by one over a long period, but it still resulted in a marked decrease in production yields per plot. However, constraints on the capital of landowners and the inability to transform mixed agriculture into specialized viticulture without dismantling the entire mezzadria system meant that phylloxera-affected fields were not replanted with specialized, low-trained vineyards as quickly in Chianti as in other areas of Tuscany.

While the provinces of Tuscany wrangled in the late 1930s and early 1940s over the provisions set forth in the ministerial decree promulgated pursuant to the Fornaciari Commission report, the Consorzio del Gallo continued collecting data, testing wines, and distributing black rooster neck labels to wines that met its standards. With the onset of the Second World War, in order to stabilize pricing and availability and to set up a mechanism to supply the Italian army with wine, local leaders in Chianti were directed to consolidate the wine produced in their areas at local collection points. One such collection point was the Enopolio of Poggibonsi. It could stock a large volume of wine and was at an important junction on the Siena-Empoli railway line. Because of the instability of supply, demand, and pricing, the Italian government in 1942 issued a decree that set maximum prices for wines. It established three categories of vini pregiati, the first pertaining to wines of more than three years of age, of national fame, and from well-known companies, including Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello di Montalcino, and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. The decree placed the “Chianti” of both the Consorzio del Gallo and the Consorzio del Putto in the second category. Needless to say, this was another blow to the aspirations of the Consorzio del Gallo. By 1943, however, this classification was the least of Chianti’s problems. When Italy signed the armistice with the United States and the United Kingdom on September 8, 1943, the German forces, once Italy’s allies, now became enemies, and a large number were on Italian soil. German soldiers occupied many villas, fattorie, and poderi in Chianti. In the summer of 1944, the Allies fought the German army in the hills of Chianti. The battle took two to three weeks. Cities and railroad junctions just outside the area, such as Poggibonsi, were directly bombed. With all of the heated conflicts between Chianti Classico and External Chianti during the twentieth century, it must never be forgotten that the real Guerra del Chianti cost the lives of countless soldiers, partisans, and civilians. Listening to the stories of the few surviving Chiantigiani who lived through World War II poignantly reminds us of this fact. Visiting the Florence American Cemetery, just north of San Casciano at the entrance to Chianti, serves as a solemn reminder of the real sacrifices made to liberate this magnificent land.