After the Second World War, the conflicts between Chianti Classico and External Chianti resumed almost immediately, complicated by the heightened jealousies and uncertainties that the July 1932 ministerial decree pronouncing the enlarged delimitation of Chianti had created. There was still no national appellation law to establish production disciplines or quality control regulations for the Chianti denomination (or its seven subzones). Because the Chianti Classico subzone had its own lobby, in the form of the Consorzio del Gallo, and because producers believed that the name Classico would add value to their wine, producers making Chianti from Chianti Classico grapes generally opted to put “Chianti Classico” instead of “Chianti” on the front label of their flasks and bottles. Meanwhile, producers in the Consorzio del Putto, with few exceptions, put only “Chianti” on their labels, often without any reference to the geographic subzone of origin (Montalbano, Rufina, Colli Fiorentini, Colli Senesi, Colli Aretini, or Colline Pisane). In fact, it was in the 1950s that the Consorzio del Putto first added the Latin motto Solum nobis, meaning “Only us” or “For us alone,” beneath its emblem on neck labels. This putto had thrown down yet another gauntlet to the gallo nero!
World War II destroyed the economies of Italy and many other European countries. With the help of the Marshall Plan, followed by the establishment and growth of the European Economic Community, a precursor of the European Union (EU), Italy began to rebound during the 1950s. EU member governments adopted Keynesian social democratic policies and established socioeconomic programs to protect the well-being and livelihoods of their respective citizens. The situation in the hills of Chianti, however, was deteriorating. In providing health care, income support, and other social benefits, the postwar Italian government weakened archaic socioeconomic structures such as the mezzadria system. The Tuscan sharecropping institution was based on the near-total dependence of the mezzadri on their padrone. A 1964 law forbade the signing of new mezzadria contracts in Italy beginning in 1974. While a subsequent law provided for the conversion of any existing mezzadria contract to one of direct cultivation at the request of either the mezzadro or the padrone, there were very few mezzadri left in Chianti by the 1970s. This was not a slow decline. It was as if after World War II the tens of thousands of mezzadri, whose ancestors had worked this land for centuries, awakened for the first time to a new world of possibility beyond their poderi and fattorie. They packed up their meager belongings and left their Chianti poderi en masse. They did not flee to the industrialized northern Italian cities, such as Milan and Turin. Instead, with their diverse trade skills and strong work ethic, mezzadri families made new lives for themselves in cities and towns just outside Chianti, such as Florence and Poggibonsi. The classic Tuscan mezzadria system, which had endured for seven centuries, dissolved in the span of a couple of decades. The exodus of the mezzadri drastically reduced the population of Chianti.
Meanwhile, market demand for low-cost “Chianti” remained strong. In export markets, the branding of the Chianti fiasco moved beyond its Italian immigrant base. By one estimate, in 1957 there were 1.5 million hectoliters (39.6 million gallons) of wine exported as “Chianti,” of which only one-half was produced by the members of the consortia of Chianti Classico and External Chianti.1 To meet this demand, the merchants of External Chianti looked far and wide in Italy for great quantities of wine to make their “Chianti.” Phylloxera and the rupture of the mezzadria system had decimated production levels in Chianti.2 During the 1950s, the production of Chianti Classico was half of what it had been two decades earlier, and its 65 percent premium over the bulk price of External Chianti wine during the 1930s had diminished considerably.3 In fact, in the 1950s the bulk sale price of Chianti Classico (between seven and eight thousand lire per hectoliter) did not even cover the costs of its production (ten to sixteen thousand lire per hectoliter).4 Part of the reason for this low value was the increase in shipments, by railroad, of cheap southern Italian blending wine to Tuscany, which drove down the price of all Chianti. The Consorzio del Gallo was fighting an increasingly uphill battle. It had not, however, given up on trying to restrict the use of the name Chianti, and it continued to work for a new national law that would supersede the July 1932 ministerial decree and delimit a smaller Chianti. The consortium also continued to set quality control regulations for its members and tested their wines to assess whether or not they met those standards. Those that passed could use the coveted black rooster label, which the consortium provided, individually numbered for traceability. Though the word Classico had yet to gain wide market recognition, the black rooster became powerful branding, signifying both genuine and quality Chianti. In 1952, Britain’s foremost wine historian, André Louis Simon, observed, “One of the most reliable brands of Chianti is retailed under the name of Chianti classico, which bears the Marca Gallo, a black cock in a field of gold.”5 In essence, the oversight of the Consorzio del Gallo meant that wines bearing the Gallo Nero neck label were better on average than wines without the trademark. Besides the normal Chianti Classico, there were two other product levels: vecchio, for wines with two years of aging before release, and stravecchio, for wines with three years of aging before release. There was no Riserva category at this time. The Consorzio del Gallo’s efforts to build a quality reputation for its members’ wines, however, was increasingly threatened from beyond Tuscany. According to Ugo Bonacossi in 2001, even the railway station in Rome was selling a private label “Chianti” with the name Chianti Stazione Termini in the 1960s. The fraudulent use of the name Chianti, combined with the low-quality product in flasks so labeled, was negatively impacting Chianti’s general image, at home and abroad. This fact was lost on no one, including Alexis Lichine, one of the leading wine writers in the 1960s: “Chianti is one of the most abused names in the world of wine. Almost every wine-growing country has taken the name and applied it to almost any red wine as long as it is sold in straw-covered flasks.”6
Chianti was in crisis. Two conferences were organized to address the future of the territory. The first, Convegno del Chianti (Conference on Chianti), was sponsored by the Georgofili Academy and held in Florence and Siena in May 1957. It focused on a wide range of economic and agricultural issues. The Consorzio del Gallo sponsored the second conference, in Radda in December of the same year. It was more technical. At the Georgofili’s Convegno del Chianti, the future of Chianti literally hung in the balance. Several speakers, experts in their respective fields, debated whether it could survive as a vinicultural region. Some maintained that it should be used only for the pasturage of animals. Giovanni Dalmasso, the architect of the Fornaciari Commission’s 1932 delimitation of Chianti, was the enological expert for the convegno. His presence loomed large for the Chiantigiani. He gave a speech titled “The Problems of Chianti’s Enology,” which observed that the immediate and central problem facing the “Chianti originario” (original Chianti) was the imbalance between its wine’s high cost of production and low bulk sale price. Dalmasso concluded that this situation was unsustainable for many estates. For him, the original Chianti could not expect a law that would give it the exclusive right to “the prestigious name of Chianti.” The July 1932 ministerial decree (which influential Italian observers perceived as a Solomonic decision at the time)7 and the commercial realities that had precipitated it had ostensibly ended that debate. Dalmasso also concluded that Chianti Classico could not hope to realize a significant increase in the market price of its wines, in part because they did not have consistent quality or character. Instead, Chianti would have to substantially reduce its costs of production in order to survive. Dalmasso argued that its winegrowers could no longer afford to plant vines on steep hills at high elevations. Another problem was the reduced size of many farms. According to Dalmasso, 62.5 percent of the properties in the Chianti Classico zone comprised only a single podere, and more than 50 percent of these had fewer than six hectares (fifteen acres). This fragmentation reduced overall wine quality and economies of scale that were required to bring down the costs of production. Dalmasso maintained that only a minority of estates in Chianti were capable of surviving. The remaining fattorie and other properties would survive solely if they worked together to develop cantine sociali, or cooperatives.8
At the end of the third and last day of the conference in Florence, Luigi Ricasoli-Firidolfi, the president of the Consorzio del Gallo and the great-grandson of Bettino Ricasoli, rose to his feet to respond to Dalmasso’s pronouncements. Ser Lapo Mazzei, at the time a young member of the consortium’s board of directors, was present in the room and vividly recounted the showdown to us: “Only one man resisted this idea, Luigi Ricasoli-Firidolfi. He was a great man. Everybody was saying, ‘Chianti is finished. You should turn your vineyards into pasture.’ He said, ‘You say this, but I say no!’” Ricasoli-Firidolfi presented a vision of the true Chianti as a territory capable of producing wine of the highest quality and worthy of its own protected denomination of origin:
But let it be clear that it is not the original zone of Chianti which should always be put on the witness stand as a defendant as if it were in the wrong, while other interests are considered to be in the right! This determination, I believe, will not be acceptable to the Chianti producers who intend to protect their name, their production, their interests, which are, in large part, their inalienable rights. . . . [These producers] are prepared to study the most opportune solutions to the problems that plague our zone, but they will not suffer acts of oppression or of clear injustice to their ancient and legitimate interests as Chianti producers and cannot allow themselves to sacrifice or be sacrificed for other interests, which are not always legitimate.9
The Iron Baron would have been proud.
With the development of the European Economic Community, there was a great need to organize the large wine industries of member countries such as France and Italy. Since the 1930s, France had had in place a comprehensive and functional wine regulation system that not only protected origin but also applied quality and style controls. In 1963 Italy promulgated Law 930, which laid the foundation for Italian denominations of origin and their regulation, a change from the laws of the 1920s and 1930s, which had emphasized vini tipici, or commercial styles of wines. Notably, Law 930 indicated that additions of must from outside a wine’s delimited zone would be regulated. While this provision must have alarmed politicians from the south of Italy who had lobbied for their regions’ bulk wine to be blended into the wines of the north, it raised the hopes of producers of Chianti Classico, who would now be somewhat protected against centuries-old unethical blending practices. Strikingly, inserted in the middle of this Italian national wine law, which established the denominations of origin pyramid, was a provision singling out the Chianti denomination and stipulating that the “zone of ‘Chianti classic’ was delimited by the July 31, 1932, ministerial decree.”10 In contrast with the laws governing France’s system of controlled appellations, Law 930, by citing this decree and expressly providing for the creation of other classico zones within similarly enlarged denominations of origin, rejected the legal principle that growers from a historic region such as Chianti (and later Soave and Valpolicella) possessed an exclusive and inalienable right to use its geographic name for their wine, based on its place of origin.
Dalmasso, the enological expert for the Fornaciari Commission whose report resulted in the 1932 ministerial decree, was initially the president of the commission that devised the blueprint for Law 930, until he resigned his post to Paolo Desana, a senator, who is considered the primary architect of the law. Some of the other members of the commission were Pier Giovanni Garoglio, an enological expert who supported the Fornaciari Commission’s Chianti solution; Nino Folonari, representing the industrial wine interests; and Salvatore Migliorisi, representing mercantile ones. According to Guglielmo Anzilotti, the director of the Consorzio del Gallo beginning in 1963, Folonari (who was the director of Ruffino and a powerful force in finance) could pick up the phone and instantly speak to the president of the Italian Republic. With the possible exception of Desana (whom, Anzilotti reported, was unfamiliar with the geography of the original Chianti), these were not individuals who would have supported a more restrictive delimitation of Chianti based on either the Consorzio del Gallo’s 1927 Statuto or the minister of the national economy’s 1928 directive.
As a general matter, Law 930 established two appellation levels, denominazione di origine controllata (controlled denomination of origin, or DOC) and the more stringent denominazione di origine controllata e garantita (controlled and guaranteed denomination of origin, or DOCG). A tasting examination of wines at bottling was the important requirement of the higher level. Any consortium that represented at least 20 percent of its denomination’s producers and volume of production could be authorized to conduct the prescribed quality controls for its members. In this sense, Law 930 created a self-regulatory appellation system that delegated compliance oversight and enforcement to private actors. It also destined Chianti Classico and External Chianti to be joined in one denomination of origin. However, it allowed for more than one consortium per denomination, thus ensuring the continuance of the Consorzio del Gallo. Nevertheless, because Chianti Classico did not account for at least 20 percent of the producers and volume of production of the unified Chianti denomination, Law 930 consigned it to be locked in protracted negotiations with External Chianti in the legal process to secure their shared DOC appellation.
Italy’s Ministry of Agriculture had to approve the regulations for the Chianti DOC (the denomination encompassing both Chianti Classico and External Chianti). Given the historic division between the two principal Chianti consortia, the Consorzio del Gallo and the Consorzio del Putto, the proposal took more time to develop than anticipated. The Consorzio del Gallo became divided between two camps, the traditionalists, such as Ser Lapo Mazzei and Enrico d’Afflitto, who fought any concession to a shared appellation with External Chianti, and the moderates, such as Bettino Ricasoli and Gualtiero Armando Nunzi, who pressed for a faster and less fractious solution. (Luigi Ricasoli, an archtraditionalist, under pressure from the moderates had ceded the presidency of the Consorzio del Gallo to his son Bettino in 1958.) There were also external pressures on the Consorzio del Gallo to make peace with External Chianti in order to obtain the DOC designation. Chianti was the most important red wine of Italy. Yet the Frascati, Ischia, and Vernaccia di San Gimignano wine regions had moved ahead to become the first DOCs, in March 1966. Securing the DOC would finally protect the word Chianti within the EU. However, the most pressing incentive might have been the imminence of Italian and EU agricultural funding programs that targeted DOCs for support. In the end, the moderates prevailed. Negotiations between the Consorzio del Gallo and the Consorzio del Putto led to an agreement for a comprehensive Chianti DOC that a decree of the president of the Italian Republic legally recognized in August 1967. Like Law 930 of 1963, Article 1 of the 1967 Chianti DOC decree delimited Chianti (and each of its seven subzones) based on the July 1932 ministerial decree, as if it still had the force of law.11
Under the Chianti DOC, Chianti Classico was the territorial distinction of wines from the Classico area as determined by the Fornaciari Commission in 1932. Chianti’s six other subzones (constituting External Chianti) were also delimited in accordance with the 1932 ministerial decree. The DOC imposed lower maximum yields in Chianti Classico, 115 quintals (a quintal being 100 kilograms, or approximately 220 pounds) per hectare (5.1 tons per acre) as opposed to External Chianti’s 125 quintals per hectare (5.6 tons per acre). While Chianti Classico’s minimum alcohol level at commercial release was set at 12 percent, External Chianti’s was 11.5 percent. For both Chianti Classico and External Chianti, the limit for “correction” with must or wine from outside the denomination (the law did not restrict the sources to Italy) was capped at 15 percent of the finished wine. These additions allowed merchants and producers to enhance color, alcohol content, structure, vintage consistency, and their profit margins. This provision garnered the support of southern Italian politicians who were allied with the interests of large-scale wine merchants in central and northern Italy. A vecchio category for both Chianti Classico and External Chianti was specified for wines that were aged a minimum of two years in an unspecified container, while a Riserva category carried a minimum age of three years. The name of one of the six External Chianti subzones could be used if the grapes and wine originated from that zone as delimited in 1932. The law required that vinification, maturation, and storage occur in the zone. Whether the legal distinctions that the Chianti DOC disciplinare (discipline) made between the original Chianti zone and the six subzones of External Chianti would distinguish Chianti Classico remained to be seen.
With the Ministry of Agriculture’s approval of the unified Chianti DOC in 1967, the Consorzio del Gallo had, in substance, legally agreed that the name Chianti was not the exclusive property of its members. As a result, on May 7, 1968, it changed its legal name from Consorzio per la Difesa del Vino Tipico Chianti e della Sua Marca di Origine to the Consorzio Vino Chianti Classico (referred to in these pages as the Chianti Classico consortium, with the Consorzio del Putto hereinafter referred to as the External Chianti consortium). Immediately, the Guerra del Chianti manifested in a new form: the desire of Chianti Classico to separate itself from External Chianti by establishing its own DOCG.
Up to this point, Chianti Classico, which had been beset by high costs of production, low bulk-wine sale prices, unethical “Chianti” labeling, and unrestricted additions of cheap cutting wine from southern Italy, had had deep financial problems. During the 1950s, the annual volume of Chianti Classico wine sold bearing the gallo nero seal averaged fifty thousand hectoliters (1.3 million gallons). During the 1960s, it increased to eighty thousand hectoliters (2.1 million gallons) per year, reaching a high of ninety thousand hectoliters (2.4 million gallons) in 1967. The new DOC, by imposing quality controls, chief among them yield limits and limited protection from extraregional wine additions, gave External Chianti a boost, and Chianti Classico an even bigger one. In the wake of the attainment of the Chianti DOC, the number of gallo nero bottles sold dropped in 1968 and 1969, but the production of new vineyards boosted sales to 131,038 hectoliters (3.5 million gallons) in 1972.12 The number of members in the Chianti Classico consortium climbed over the five hundred mark by July 1968, representing 90 percent of the zone’s production. Bulk wine prices of Chianti Classico during 1969, the first year when the full impact of the DOC was felt, reached a decade-high point.13 Moreover, the differential between the prices of Chianti Classico bulk wine and those of External Chianti wine also reached a high point.14 At the same time, DOC recognition for the unified Chianti set the stage for agricultural funding to flow from the EU. For the first time, Chianti Classico and External Chianti enjoyed appellation protections within the EU and leverage in negotiations to prohibit the misuse of their names by non-EU countries.
The regulations for the Chianti DOC allowed for great flexibility in the varietal blends of wines for both Chianti Classico and External Chianti. They had to contain 50 to 80 percent Sangiovese, 10 to 30 percent Canaiolo Nero, 10 to 30 percent Trebbiano and Malvasia del Chianti, and 5 percent unspecified complementary varieties. Unusually, these were percentages not of the varieties in the final wine blend but of what was planted in the vineyards. Trebbiano is so productive per vine that its volumetric percentage in the resulting wine could be much higher than its percent of contributing vines might suggest. This disease-resistant and productive variety lowered costs and made red wine lighter in color, body, and structure. As a practical matter, the varietal regulations in the 1967 Chianti DOC had been dictated by the planted mix already extant throughout the larger Chianti denomination and thus established a recipe for “Chianti” based on commercial priorities rather than quality considerations.
The Italian government had the responsibility of ensuring that the DOC disciplinare was followed, but ultimately the system relied on self-reporting by producers. The Chianti DOC required annual declarations from farmer-bottlers and merchants. In order for a producer to put Chianti Classico DOC on a wine’s front label, its grapes had to be grown exclusively in vineyards registered to produce Chianti Classico. The Chianti Classico consortium employed inspectors to investigate producer declarations and tested its members’ wine samples in its in-house laboratory. Those members whose wines passed the consortium’s technical and other testing controls received the quantity of Black Rooster bottle seals necessary for their production. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the consortium’s members were responsible for about 90 percent of the production of Chianti Classico.
The Fascist period, World War II, and the disorganization that followed had left the Italian agricultural sector in tatters. Beginning in the 1960s, Italy and the EU established programs to help. In the Chianti Classico appellation, three factors made intervention a necessity to kick-start renewal: the deterioration of the mezzadria system, six decades characterized by minimal investment in viticulture, and the dry and rocky terrain (which made typical agricultural entrepreneurialism less profitable). Generally, the Italian and EU funding programs provided low-interest loans and matching grants to wine producers. The Italian state, in addition, offered tax benefits. The Italian government set up three programs, Primo Piano Verde in 1961, Secondo Piano Verde in 1966, and Ponte Verde in 1971 (collectively referred to as the Piani Verdi, or “Green plans”).15 The EU offered the Fondo Europeo di Orientamento e Garanzia Agricola (FEOGA, or European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund), an instrument for agricultural loans and grants. It operated in concert with the Italian government’s Secondo Piano Verde program to provide substantial loans and other aid.16 The Secondo Piano Verde specifically targeted “planting vines in specialized cultivation” in districts delimited pursuant to Italian Law 930 of 1963, “for the protection of controlled or controlled and guaranteed designations of origin.”17 From 1967 to 1972, the projects that the Piani Verdi and FEOGA supported had a profound impact on Chianti Classico and other areas in Tuscany. Inevitably, the renovation of Italian vineyards that FEOGA subsidized resulted in an oversupply of bulk wine. After 1977, direct EU intervention in Italy’s agricultural sector ended, but the Italian state and its regions continued underwriting agricultural support programs with both their own funds and those that flowed down from the EU. Throughout Tuscany, terraces were bulldozed and vineyards that had been coplanted with other crops were uprooted. In their place, larger vineyards dedicated to vines supported on wires were installed. These programs continued, but on a diminished scale, until January 2007. Qualifying applicants used the support to replant vineyards, buy new winery equipment, and build modern winery facilities. Most of the replanting involved the conversion of promiscuous viticulture to vineyard monoculture. In the early 1960s, more than 95 percent of wine grapes came from mixed agriculture.18 By 1977 there were 6,877 hectares (16,993 acres, or 26.6 square miles) of specialized vineyards and 6,122 hectares (15,128 acres, or 23.6 square miles) of promiscuous culture.19 Today the number of hectares with promiscuous culture in Chianti is minuscule. Nurseries throughout the regions of Tuscany and Romagna provided high-yielding rootstocks grafted onto vine budwood of unknown provenance.20 Agricultural consultants recommended wide spacing so that tractors could move easily in the vineyards. The contours of hills were smoothed or removed. Stone terraces that had been in place on steep hills for centuries were demolished, increasing erosion and water runoff and decreasing the sun’s ability to heat the soil via radiation absorbed by the stone walls. Suppliers from agrochemical companies pushed chemical herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers. This also increased erosion and depleted the population of microorganisms that had enriched the soil. The results were higher yields and disease resistance but low-quality fruit. Equipment such as tractors reduced person-hours. With less farm labor needed, estate owners were able to compensate, in part, for the loss of their sharecropper tenants.
The concrete skeleton that scars the scenic roadway leading up to Castello di Volpaia in Radda is a monument to the wastefulness of indiscriminate public funding. This structure was meant to be a cooperative aging cellar for local wine producers. Italian state and EU funds supported the project. Its organizers, however, never asked the local Chianti Classico producers if they needed it. Well into the construction, which started in 1976, the project was suspended when it was evident that no one would use it. Ownership of the gray skeleton passed from the Ministry of Agriculture to the region of Tuscany and finally to the township of Radda, which plans to turn it into a parking garage.
It takes an expert’s eye to identify poorly sited vineyards. A drive around Chianti Classico in the early 2000s with one of Tuscany’s leading enologists was eye opening. He occasionally waved his hand in disgust at vineyards planted on ill-suited soils. He could tell by the age of the vines and the way they were planted, at a low density in wide rows with wires stretched between concrete stakes. Nonetheless, because vineyards in Chianti Classico occupy only 10 percent of the countryside—unlike in Barolo, Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Alsace, where they take up a high percentage of the land—this landscape survived the 1965 to 1975 “improvements” much better than many other areas.
From a wine quality perspective, the negative effects of poorly planned vineyards were more evident. They spanned the thirty-year productive life of these vineyards, roughly from 1970 to 2000. It is no coincidence that this was the period when Sangiovese was found lacking and when Cabernet Sauvignon and then Merlot and Syrah were introduced into Chianti Classico vineyards to “improve” the wine by making it darker and more concentrated. Paolo Panerai, the owner of Castellare, believes that the Chianti Classico wines of the 1950s and 1960s were better than those of subsequent decades, when producers were forced to use the FEOGA-generation grapes. Those subpar vineyards made it easier for “Super Tuscans” to rise above Chianti Classico in blind tastings. During the first decade of the 2000s, however, new vineyards replaced those planted from 1965 to 1975.
In addition to losing their agricultural workforce, large landholders saw runaway postwar inflation and rising land and income taxation devour their financial resources. Many did not have the expertise (or desire) to transform their estates into modern profit-making enterprises. To access cash, they sold off, one by one or en masse, the homesteads deserted by sharecroppers, leaving isolated stone houses and little stone ghost towns (like the villages of Olena and Ama before they were renovated beginning in the 1990s).
During the 1970s, the value of Chianti Classico land and farm buildings was at a twentieth-century low point. Many buyers took advantage, coming from nearby industrial towns such as Pistoia or from Piedmont, Rome, and as far south as Naples. They were most often upper-middle-class Italian professionals who used their postwar disposable income to buy weekend homes in the countryside. Many of their properties became boutique wineries during the 1990s and 2000s. The De Marchi family from Piedmont purchased Isole e Olena in Barberino Val d’Elsa in 1956. In 1961, Aldo Bianchi from Milan also purchased land in Barberino, which later became Castello di Monsanto. In 1973, Italo Zingarelli, a film producer working in Rome, bought a deserted borgo (village) and created the Rocca delle Macìe wine estate, an eighty-five-hectare (210-acre) property in Castellina in Chianti.
The British have a long-standing fascination with Florence and its environs. They also acquired properties in the city and its surrounding countryside in this period. By the 1970s and 1980s, the British were so well represented in Chianti that they referred to it as Chiantishire. John Dunkley bought a podere, Riecine, in Gaiole in 1971. The first vintage of Riecine Chianti Classico, the 1973, was released in 1975. Norman Bain, a Scot, bought fourteen hectares (thirty-five acres) in Panzano, which became the winery Le Masse di San Leolino. The Swiss often found refuge in Chianti Classico as well. In 1981, Brigitte and Bruno Widmer bought eight and a half hectares (twenty acres) of vineyards in Castellina. This became the Brancaia winery. In 1988, Roberto Guldener, another Swiss, bought Terrabianca, 124 hectares (307 acres) also in Castellina. But wine producers from northern Italy made larger purchases of land. In 1969, the Triacca family from Valtellina in Lombardy bought the old Villa Franchi estate (345 hectares, or 853 acres) in Greve in Chianti. They renamed it La Madonnina. In 1979, the Zonin family from the Veneto acquired Castello di Albola and more than eight hundred hectares (about two thousand acres, or more than three square miles) of land in Radda in Chianti. Outsiders like these made an important contribution to the restoration and preservation of the Chianti Classico landscape—and to the evolution of the Chianti Classico appellation.
After the Second World War, the labor force of flask dressers (usually women from tenant farmer or laborer families) was much less available to do the time-consuming and low-paying job of weaving dried reeds around “Chianti” flasks. As a result, the cost of producing the fiasco increased. In general, inexpensive “Chianti” continued to be bottled in the fiasco. During the postwar period, Melini still released most of its wines, most from External Chianti, in straw-covered fiaschi. Its image remained strongly attached to the fiasco, which did not help its reputation by the 1970s. More expensive Chianti and Chianti Classico DOC, on the other hand, were increasingly sold in Bordelais-style glass bottles. The Consorzio del Gallo began to discourage its members from using the fiasco in the 1960s. So immediately recognizable and endearing was it, however, that it remained in wide distribution until the 1970s. The key inflection point was 1969, when the number of Bordeaux bottles (0.2- to 5-liter, or 0.21- to 5.3-quart, sizes) registered as Chianti Classico exceeded the number of fiaschi (0.475- to 3.78-liter, or 0.502- to 3.99-quart, sizes) so registered. From then on, the standardization of packaging required by mechanized bottling lines, the use of wooden and cardboard boxes, and the need to stack bottles for storage further favored the Bordelais bottle over the Chianti flask.21 More important, for those producers wishing to distinguish themselves from run-of-the-mill “Chianti,” the fiasco was a barrier to moving upmarket. In the late 1970s the flask was the exception, not the rule, for Chianti Classico. Ruffino stopped bottling in fiaschi altogether in 1975. In their place, it introduced its own, trademark-protected (and less rustic) bottle design, the “Florentine.” This had some of the curve of the flask and was without a straw skirt. It was designed to project elegance and to connect subliminally with the historical appeal of the fiasco. A symbol of the rise of the bottle and the growing prestige of Chianti Classico was the introduction of magnums (1.49 liters, or 1.6 quarts) of Chianti Classico in 1972.22 But the fiasco was not a relic to everyone in Chianti. One of Tuscany’s most esteemed enologists, Giacomo Tachis, had great fondness for it. To him, the fiasco represented the authentic culture of Tuscany, particularly that of the original Chianti. He understood that the problem was not the container but the contents.
The Barone Ricasoli estate emerged from World War II as the blue-chip label for Chianti Classico. It defined Chianti wine in both prestige and market power. In the early 1950s, Luigi Ricasoli, at the helm of several thousands of hectares of Ricasoli-Firidolfi property, found his situation untenable as mezzadri left their poderi in droves and as the price of bulk Chianti Classico deteriorated to below the cost of production. Seeking another source of revenue, he speculated in olive oil, buying enormous quantities from Mediterranean countries such as Turkey, Spain, and Portugal. In 1953 the price of olive oil collapsed, and he was forced to sell most of the Ricasoli-Firidolfi properties to cover his losses. Castello di Brolio and Castello di Cacchiano, however, remained Ricasoli estates. But Chianti was still in crisis and Brolio’s continued to mount. In 1958, Bettino Ricasoli, the namesake of the creator of the Chianti recipe, sold a 50 percent share of the Barone Ricasoli winery and brand to the Seagram’s drinks business while retaining ownership of the Castello di Brolio vineyards and the castle in Gaiole in Chianti. Seagram’s gradually increased its ownership to 95 percent before selling it to the British businessman Roger Lamberth in 1986. Under Seagram’s, the image of the Castello di Brolio/Barone Ricasoli wines was tarnished. As a global spirits company, it did not understand an Old World wine estate like Castello di Brolio. According to one experienced winegrower in Chianti, in the space of one year Seagram’s American executives managing the Brolio investment went from buying up all of the available Chianti Classico juice in the appellation to dumping on the market all of the Brolio Riserva wines from casks. Ironically, during its tenure in Chianti, Seagram’s sold more External Chianti than Chianti Classico wine.
During the post–World War II period, the firms of Ruffino, Melini, and Serristori competed with Ricasoli for market visibility. But it was the Marchesi Antinori company that filled the vacuum created by the sale of Ricasoli to Seagram’s. Luigi Ricasoli and his family faced a much greater crisis than did the Antinori family when the mezzadria system began to collapse during the 1950s. Ricasoli was the largest landholder in Chianti, with thousands of hectares and many poderi. His entire agricultural empire fell apart. Niccolò Antinori, however, was a merchant without significant landholdings. His firm largely bought, blended, and sold wine. The company was well managed and well positioned to confront the new global wine market in the second half of the twentieth century.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Marchesi Antinori company evolved from modestly sized and known for its easy-to-drink (i.e., soft and fruity) Santa Cristina Chianti Classico wine to a large firm with an upscale image. Tachis, Antinori’s enologist from 1961 to 1993, described Niccolò Antinori, the father of Piero Antinori, who succeeded him as the company’s president in 1966, as the first person in Tuscany to understand the world of wine. According to Tachis, he was more perceptive than his Tuscan contemporaries about the future of the wine market. He bought vineyards to improve and stabilize the quality of the Antinori brand. He upgraded winery equipment. Antinori’s pre–World War II premium wine, Villa Antinori Chianti Classico, which was inspired by Bordeaux in style, packaging, and ability to age, found placements in embassies, hotels, and restaurants around the world. Under Antinori’s direction, the company created its own domestic sales network and sold directly to restaurants. The firm valued customer care, a modern perspective that replaced the traditional one, which left the job up to companies further down the distribution chain. In 1961, Antinori hired Tachis for his enological team. First as the winemaker and general manager for the Antinori company and later as a consulting winemaker for wineries throughout Italy, Tachis became the guiding light of Italian enology. Antinori understood the potential of Sassicaia, a Bordeaux blend from the Tuscan coast, and brought it to Tachis’s attention. Piero, after taking over from his father, ushered Antinori into the world market. Antinori of the 1970s and 1980s became the leader of the “Super Tuscan” movement. In so doing, it moved its emphasis away from Chianti Classico. Santa Cristina, named after a podere of a large fattoria, Montenisa, in San Casciano, went from being a Chianti Classico to a vino da tavola (table wine) in 1986–87 and then to an IGT (indicazione geografica tipica, a recently created category that, while linked to geographic territory, is less restrictive than the higher classifications of the DOC and the DOCG) in 1994. Villa Antinori was a Chianti Classico Riserva until 2001, when it also became an IGT. Ostensibly this shift in the change of legal classification was to allow for the use of lower-cost grapes and larger sources of supply. But during the 1970s, the company had realized that it could expand faster and make better margins by focusing on its brands and the prestige associated with the iconic beauty of Tuscany rather than the deteriorating image associated with the word Chianti.
Italy’s largest public wine company, Gruppo Italiano Vini (GIV), purchased both Melini and Serristori in the postwar period. After acquiring Serristori, it built a new brand, Villa Machiavelli, bottled as a Chianti Classico. Another high-quality merchant company was Straccali, founded in 1925 by Giulio Straccali. This firm had a strong presence in the United States. Ruffino too had a strong overseas market presence, which it worked to strengthen. A merchant before a producer, Ruffino was more closely associated with the sale of External Chianti than of Chianti Classico. However, in 1955 it produced its Riserva Ducale as a Chianti Classico for the first time, signaling its interest in the prestige of Chianti Classico. In 1967, a year before the Folonari family (the owner of Ruffino) sold the Folonari winery in Brescia, the Ruffino company purchased its first estate in the Chianti Classico appellation, Fattoria di Zano in Greve in Chianti. In the United States of the late 1970s, the Ruffino Riserva Ducale gold label was an early Chianti Classico icon. In addition to the railway hub of Pontassieve northeast of the Chianti Classico zone, beginning in October 1964 Ruffino was perfectly positioned to take advantage of Autostrada A1, also known as the Autostrada del Sole (Motorway of the sun), which passed just to its south. This highway connects Milan with Naples via Bologna, Florence, Pontassieve, and Rome. It is the most important highway in Italy.
The locus for lower-cost volume “Chianti” (both External and Classico) was Poggibonsi, just southwest of the Chianti Classico zone. It is on the Empoli-Siena railroad line and the Superstrada del Palio, a toll-free highway that links Siena and Florence. Poggibonsi is the site of the Granducato Enopolio, the winemaking production facility of the Consorzio Agraria di Siena (Agricultural cooperative of Siena). Before the Second World War and during the early postwar period, the Enopolio was an important center for collection, blending, and transporting southern Chianti Classico wine, as well as External Chianti and Vernaccia di San Gimignano wine. After World War II, Poggibonsi’s two most important merchant houses, Cecchi and Piccini, grew quickly. They both had a working-class image. Cecchi’s solid working-class roots connected its wines to Italian immigrants throughout the Americas. In the 1960s, the Cecchi family acquired its own piece of Chianti, Villa Cerna in Castellina. The story of Piccini is not unlike that of Cecchi, one of expansion into a world looking for good-value “Chianti,” with successive generations making greater investments in Chianti Classico and eventually moving the firm’s winery into Castellina. In this regard, the Cecchi family showed vision ahead of some of the most prominent Florentine landholding families, who made sizable investments decades later to acquire (either by purchase or by long-term lease) vineyards in the Chianti Classico appellation.
During the 1950s, on the Tuscan coast and in many other areas of Italy, the Italian government expropriated land from large agricultural landholdings called latifundia and redistributed pieces to poor farmers, often those who lived and had worked there as sharecroppers. It was common for these farmers to join other small farmers to form cooperatives. There were many advantages to doing so. The cooperative gave them protection against the often exploitive behavior of merchants. To enter the market, small farmers had to overcome the handicap of their marginal negotiating power. By organizing cooperatives, they could work as co-owners to pool their resources, particularly their crops and capital, and thereby attain economies of scale. They could hire technicians to transform their crops into marketable wine and market specialists to commercialize it. These groups also formed voting blocks that could cultivate the support of politicians. Cooperatives usually had a political leaning, to the right, left, or center, and typically had a political sponsor (such as an elected official at the regional or national level), who initially helped them to organize and secure funding from governmental programs such as the Piani Verdi and FEOGA initiatives. Social democratic political policies looked favorably on cooperative enterprises because they preserved livelihoods during a period of great change. The Communist Party also favored cooperative associations.
However, land reform never occurred in Chianti. Unlike in other areas of Italy, where only small landholders formed wine cooperatives, in Chianti landholders of all sizes did so. With the sudden breakdown of the mezzadria system during the 1950s, the former padroni (the plural of padrone) in traditional Chianti moved to form cooperative associations to buffer the negative effects of this disintegration and to manage the costs of planting specialized vineyards and building new wineries. They took advantage of the Piani Verdi and FEOGA programs, which preferentially gave funds, tax breaks, and low- or no-interest loans to cooperatives. The joint vinification, storage, bottling, and stocking facilities of cooperatives were low cost and efficient. Farmers could share in the profits from growing their grapes and processing and commercializing the resulting wine.
In 1961, the cooperative Agricoltori del Chianti Geografico (Farmers of geographic Chianti) was formed. Its members were large landholders, mostly from the southern half of Chianti Classico. In 1965, the entrepreneur Gualtiero Armando Nunzi organized small to large winegrowers in Chianti Classico into the Castelli del Grevepesa cooperative. It became large quickly, operating principally in the northern half of the Chianti Classico appellation. Both cooperatives were allied with Christian Democracy, which was the dominant, center-left party in Italy during the postwar period. Though smaller than Castelli del Grevepesa, Agricoltori del Chianti Geografico was politically well connected. Its sponsor was Amintore Fanfani, the prime minister of Italy for most of the period between 1958 and 1963. In 1975, the cooperative Le Chiantigiane was formed at Tavarnelle Val di Pesa. Unlike the others, it did not vinify its own wine but instead bought bulk wine, consolidated it, and resold it either in bulk or in bottle. This cooperative was closely allied with the Communist Party, which, particularly during the 1970s, appealed to former mezzadri and to many other lower-class and lower-middle-class Tuscans. It produced considerably less Chianti Classico than the other two cooperatives.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Chianti Classico cooperatives began to compete with merchants in their volume of production. At the outset, the cooperatives sold most of the Chianti Classico wine that they produced in bulk to merchants, who bottled it under their own brand names. Increasing unsold stocks in the early 1980s forced cooperatives to bottle and commercialize their own wines. During that period, merchants also began to rely on the production of their own vineyards. By the early 1990s, the cooperatives were the largest-volume producers of Chianti Classico wine. However, during that decade members began to peel away as they sought to take advantage of the booming market by bottling Chianti Classico wines (and Super Tuscans) under their own estate labels.
Despite the wrangling between the two Chianti consortia in the years leading up to the unified Chianti DOC in 1967, the late 1960s were hopeful for the Chianti Classico consortium. The black rooster symbol was strong as an indication of authenticity and quality. The consortium controlled 90 percent of the production of Chianti Classico DOC wine.23 However, the 1970s were a difficult decade for the consortium and for Chianti Classico in general. The division between Chianti Classico and External Chianti masked the underlying divisions within the Chianti Classico consortium. One obvious fault line was between large producer-merchants such as Ruffino on the one hand and growers such as Fonterutoli who sold wine to producer-merchants on the other hand. The cooperatives were a new market player; in effect, they acted as large producers composed of growers of all sizes. Until the early 1970s, merchants had accounted for more than 70 percent of the Chianti Classico wine attributed to the consortium, according to Ser Lapo Mazzei. But during that decade, growers, who had previously supplied the merchants with wine, began to bottle some of their own production. This newfound source of income made them less dependent on the merchants. The number of consortium-member bottlers grew from 56 in 1967 to 242 in 1974,24 a sign of the coming transformation. During the mid-1970s, the volume of wine produced by cooperatives that were consortium members also increased. The merchants had fundamentally different interests than the growers, grower-bottlers, and cooperatives.
The consortium’s operations were largely funded by fees associated with the volume of wine that members registered. There was an added fee for the black rooster neck labels that advertised consortium membership. At the beginning of 1974, a group of midsize and small producers in the consortium insisted that the payment for the neck labels should increase and that this money be used to promote the black rooster mark. The large producers and merchants, among them Ricasoli, Antinori, Serristori, and San Felice, strongly resisted this proposal.25 These producers (who also acted as merchants, buying up bulk wine throughout the appellation) did not want to share the black rooster mark with inexperienced grower-bottlers, whom they claimed were making inferior wines. Publicly, they stated that the consortium should invest more in regulatory controls and less in marketing (particularly of the black rooster symbol, which they maintained was already dominant). They argued that they had invested significantly in the promotion of their estate brands and should not be compelled to contribute more to the consortium for the neck labels in order to sustain small producers with little brand recognition of their own. Privately, they could not tolerate the idea of sharing a logo with novice bottlers, whom they believed had not invested sufficiently in their products. They also feared that subsidizing smaller bottlers would lead to a reduction in the supply of wine in the bulk market over the long run, as more small growers bottled their own wine. In January 1974 several large producers issued an ultimatum that they would leave the consortium if it used funds for the promotion of the black rooster instead of ensuring quality control as required by the DOC law and consortium standards. The board of directors rejected the ultimatum in March. The stage was set for some serious changes within the consortium.
At the same board of directors meeting, Bettino Ricasoli Firidolfi, the president of the consortium, resigned. Given that Seagram’s then owned the controlling share of the Ricasoli winery and merchant house, the Ricasoli company’s interests were aligned with the large producers. It and the Antinori company immediately made good on their ultimatum and resigned. Ruffino’s Chianti Classico–based estates, Zano, Nozzole, and Montemasso, also left the consortium. Mazzei, one of the vice presidents, was offered the president’s role. Recalling this moment to us forty years later, in 2014, he recounted how he had received telephone calls warning him not to assume the presidency because without the support of the large producers, the consortium would not survive. He told the callers that he would not be swayed by fear. His answer to each of them: “Why not try?” Mazzei accepted the presidency that month, March 1974 (two months before the fiftieth anniversary of the Chianti Classico consortium). He had more to lose than his reputation. His farm, Fonterutoli, at the time sold most of its grapes to large merchants. As retribution, they could have stopped buying from him. His executive position at the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze (Savings bank of Florence) and hence his connection to the financial world and credit markets bolstered his support among consortium members and probably warded off his enemies. His authoritative style was a marked change from the more gentle and laissez-faire Ricasoli. Someone strong was needed to keep the consortium together, and a strong man was what it got.
The impact of the departure of Antinori, Ricasoli, and Ruffino was immediate. In 1974, the consortium’s members produced 143,144 hectoliters (3.8 million gallons) of Chianti Classico wine. In the first full year following the departure of these large producers, that quantity dropped precipitously, to 85,182 hectoliters (2.3 million gallons). By 1976, however, the volume rebounded, to 134,558 hectoliters (3.6 million gallons), due to the entry of cooperative wineries such as Castelli del Grevepesa into the consortium’s ranks.26
Until the 1970s, Tuscans perceived grape growing and winemaking as separate, almost disconnected, enterprises. Grapes were grown in the vineyard, and wine was made in the cellar. Giulio Gambelli and Giacomo Tachis were the men of the cellar who had the greatest impact on Chianti Classico beginning in that decade. Gambelli was Chianti Classico DOC to his core. He was born and raised in Poggibonsi, and his principal haunts were the cellars of southwestern Chianti Classico and Montalcino. He was dedicated to Sangiovese and its native expression. Though Gambelli worked in many cellars as a master taster, influencing how their wines were vinified, matured, and blended for many years, Montevertine was the only estate that put his name on the front label. In the 1970s, Tachis was not recognized in public literature beyond his role at Antinori. He liked full-bodied red wines with structure, understood what the market and journalists wanted, and had a great influence on the style of Tuscan red wine. There were two viticultural specialists who worked closely with him during this period, Carlo Modi and Valerio Barbieri. Modi was both an agronomist and a functionary in the Tuscan agricultural bureaucracy. Junior to Modi, Barbieri became a freelance viticultural consultant in Chianti Classico in 1972 (after serving as a farm manager at Isole e Olena in the 1960s). Tachis recognized their talents and worked closely with both men.
For a region to develop a sophisticated wine culture, it must cultivate expert wine tasters. In Italy, someone who could recognize wines’ provenance and quality by sampling them and who could foresee how they could be successfully blended was given the informal title of master wine taster, or, in Italian, palatista or maestro assaggiatore. Palatistas often worked in the trade as agents or mediatori for merchant houses. They developed their innate skill by tasting numerous wine samples every day. Luigi Cecchi, Giulio Straccali, and Duilio Fossi, the owner of a small Florentine merchant wine house of the same name, were great palatistas. Among wine consultants, Gambelli, Tachis, and Mario Cortevesio, a Piedmontese working out of Greve, demonstrated the same skill. They directly trained and indirectly influenced many of today’s best tasters in the Tuscan wine trade. Since the 1980s, professional wine critics and journalists have assumed the role of palatista, though they have a different mission and impact on the wine trade. Enrico Bosi was Chianti Classico’s first modern wine critic. He published Atlante del Chianti Classico in 1972. This book caused an uproar because it dared to rank the wines of the zone from one to four stars. It would not be the last publication to do so.
In addition to assisting its members to secure Italian and EU funds, the Chianti Classico consortium supported scientific research, setting up stations within the appellation to monitor rainfall and conducting experiments. During the 1970s, the Notiziario del Chianti Classico, the consortium’s monthly publication for members, expanded its coverage of scientific and commercial issues faced by wine producers. The volume of advertisements by viticultural and enological suppliers also increased. The consortium held several conventions at the Palazzo dei Congressi, a prestigious conference location in Florence. These events brought together key politicians, scientists, professors, and industry representatives. The consortium’s director, Guglielmo Anzilotti, with other influential members, created a new Lega del Chianti, a society dedicated to the preservation of Chianti’s wine and culture.
With all this help, Chianti Classico producers should have improved quality and moved upmarket. Unfortunately, the marginal raw material that growers planted beginning in the 1960s in connection with the Piani Verdi and FEOGA agricultural programs yielded huge volumes of low-concentration fruit, which made it difficult for them to make the leap. This volume was the result of high-yielding clones and rootstocks, heavy fertilization, and other new vineyard technologies, and this destabilized the bulk market for Chianti Classico wine. From 1967 to 1977 the annual production of Chianti Classico more than doubled, from 117,000 to 300,000 hectoliters (3,090,813 to 7,925,162 gallons), to this day still its maximum.27 The wines were so light and thin that it was well known that they were “corrected” by other Italian wines, particularly those from the south. The large merchants were in a better position to take advantage of these “corrective” measures. They sent their enologists to secure sources of bulk wine in Sicily, Apulia, and Sardinia.
After a surge in bulk wine prices for Chianti Classico in 1973,28 the combination of dropping domestic consumption, rising yields, and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ oil embargo of 1974, which was followed by a worldwide stock market crash, resulted in a severe drop in bulk wine prices in 1975. There was too much supply and too little demand. The late 1960s bulk pricing that had put a premium on Chianti Classico over External Chianti had only been temporary. By the 1970s, the difference in their bulk wine prices became too small to justify Chianti Classico’s lower required yields and higher agricultural costs. In 1975 and 1976, Chianti Classico also had unsustainably high ratios of stock to production, respectively 2.5:1 and 2.4:1. The smaller production volume from 1975 through 1978 helped to reduce its inventory and reach the ratio of 1.2:1 by 1979.29 However, as of 1978, the cost of production was still higher than the sale price on the bulk market.30 The situation remained bleak into the early 1980s.
More and more estates, unable to sell their wines in bulk at a reasonable price, took the risk of bottling and commercializing it. At the end of the 1970s, the United States became the most important export market for Chianti Classico. In the early 1980s, it accounted for 20 percent of the wine exported by Chianti Classico consortium members. With higher per-bottle prices than the German and U.K. markets, the U.S. market helped to establish a foundation for higher margins during the mid-to-late 1980s.
With all of the legal, commercial, and agricultural challenges that Chianti Classico faced in the 1960s and 1970s, the appellation had not built a reputation for quality. Merchants there were still constructing blends with wines purchased from fattorie that neither grew quality grapes nor had the infrastructure to vinify correctly. Chianti Classico was burdened with the image not only of External Chianti but also of the fiasco. In this atmosphere of stagnation, a wine that would change Tuscany was born in Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast. The story began after World War II. Niccolò Antinori’s brother-in-law Mario Incisa della Rocchetta made a wine at his Tenuta San Guido estate that he named Sassicaia after a vineyard of less than one hectare (about 2.5 acres) cut out of the woods on a hill at 350 meters (about 1,150 feet) above sea level. Incisa, Piedmontese by origin and a lover of Bordeaux red wines, made Sassicaia for his dinner table and as gifts for his friends. According to his son Nicolò, the first vintage was “probably” the 1948. The grapes came principally from old local clones of Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese. Incisa eschewed the traditional large chestnut barrels typical of Tuscan winemaking in favor of French barriques, made of oak. Sassicaia remained largely unknown for about fifteen years. Then Incisa planted an extra nine hectares (twenty-two acres) of Cabernet in 1963 and began to think about selling some of it. Antinori tasted the wine and recognized its quality but noted that it had some volatile acidity. He brought the wine to the attention of his enologist, Tachis. Tachis took control of the winemaking, reduced the volatile acidity, and stabilized the wine for commercial sale. In the early 1970s, Piero Antinori, having taken over the management of the Antinori company from his father, expressed an interest in commercializing the wine. Incisa agreed, and the first commercial vintage was the 1968. Since no DOC or DOCG was applicable to Sassicaia, they released it as common table wine, a vino da tavola.
Incisa invited the famous journalist Luigi Veronelli to taste the wine. Veronelli wrote an article in 1974 in which he praised the 1968 vintage. Widespread acclaim came in 1978, when, at a blind tasting in London, the 1972 Sassicaia was served along with thirty-three of the world’s most famous wines and was judged the best. It became the archetype for other Tuscan and Italian wine producers. With its Bordeaux varietals and barrique maturation, Sassicaia inspired other Chianti Classico producers to seek their fame and fortune by also going outside the Italian denomination of origin wine law. Making wines with deeper color and more structure like the classified châteaux of Bordeaux, estates in Chianti found it easier to get press attention and move upmarket (in prestige and price) with Sassicaia-like wines than with their Chianti Classico wines. By the mid-1980s, the American wine press had anointed this new marketing category “Super Tuscans.” With the proliferation of these wines, the trade and consumers came to view Chianti Classico’s Riserva category as too traditional. Riservas also usually lacked a unique “sell” story, while Super Tuscans typically came with one. As Super Tuscans overshadowed Chianti Classico’s wines, history, culture, and place were sidelined.
The Antinori company’s second Super Tuscan was Tignanello. Like Sassicaia, it was named for the originating vineyard, though unlike Sassicaia it was born in the Chianti Classico appellation (in the south-central area of the township of San Casciano). In 1970, Antinori released its first Villa Antinori Chianti Classico Riserva Vigneto Tignanello. In 1971, however, Tignanello was released as a vino da tavola instead of a Chianti Classico Riserva. The reason that the company gave for this reclassification was that Tignanello had small doses of white grapes—namely, Trebbiano and Malvasia del Chianti in an amount significantly less than the 10 percent minimum required by the DOC regulations. According to Piero Antinori, the second vintage of Tignanello (which was released in 1975) was the first to include Cabernet Sauvignon. At that time, producers in Chianti Classico began to follow Antinori’s lead and use less than the minimum of white grapes required by law and more French vine varieties such as Cabernet and Merlot in their blends. Tignanello was the first Sangiovese-dominant wine to mature in barriques. This was not inconsistent with the Chianti Classico DOC regulations. The oaky aroma imparted by new barriques and the way the oak-derived tannins bulked up the palate, however, pushed the wine’s profile, regardless of varietal blend, toward Bordeaux and away from Tuscany. Antinori and Tachis were the architects of Tignanello. It became not only the calling card of Marchesi Antinori but also one of the company’s most profitable brands (if not the most profitable). The section of the Tignanello vineyard dedicated to producing the wine is fifty-seven hectares (141 acres). It has a large production for high-priced wine, amounting to several hundred thousand bottles per year. Tignanello made Antinori the envy of ambitious wine producers in Chianti Classico, in Tuscany, and in Italy—and it still does.
While the Super Tuscan label was popularly applied to many “Bordeaux blends” inspired by Sassicaia and its followers, there was another Super Tuscan revolution in progress. It was born of the same frustration with Italian wine law and the endless War of Chianti. However, the Chianti Classico producers who launched this revolution took their inspiration more from Sangiovese than from Cabernet Sauvignon. The little-known second Super Tuscan, and the first from Chianti Classico, was the 1968 Vigorello of San Felice from Castelnuovo Berardenga. Enzo Morganti was managing San Felice when the wine was created. It was a 100 percent Sangiovese and therefore could not be labeled a Chianti Classico, because the rules in the Chianti DOC discipline mandated the use of white varieties. The master taster Gambelli assisted Morganti in the cellar with this wine. Next, Fabrizio Bianchi, the owner of Castello di Monsanto in Barberino Val d’Elsa, released the 1974 Sangioveto Grosso “Chianti V.Q.P.R.D., dai Vigneti di Scanni.” Though the word Chianti was printed on the label, this wine was also 100 percent Sangiovese. Thus, it was technically in violation of the Chianti Classico DOC discipline. Bianchi released the 1975 vintage with a legal label: “1975 Sangioveto Grosso, vino da tavola, Vigna Scanni.” Le Pergole Torte, first released by Sergio Manetti of Montevertine in 1977, was and has remained 100 percent Sangiovese. Gambelli also helped to make this wine. Castello di Querceto’s first vintage of La Corte, another 100 percent Sangiovese single-vineyard wine, was 1978. From 1979 through 1985, several other important Chianti Classico winegrowers took up the cause of Sangiovese, including Castellare (I Sodi di San Niccolò), Montagliari (Brunesco di San Lorenzo), Castello di Volpaia (Coltassala), Isole e Olena (Cepparello), Badia a Coltibuono (Sangioveto), Fontodi (Flaccianello della Pieve), Riecine (La Gioia), Fèlsina (Fontalloro), and San Giusto a Rentennano (Percarlo). Though these producers embraced Sangiovese as the noble vine variety of Chianti, many also emulated the Bordeaux technology that Tachis employed in making Sassicaia and Tignanello. Those Sangiovese Super Tuscan producers who used new French barriques for aging (instead of the more traditional, bigger-format chestnut or oak casks) created wines that smelled of new oak and were richer and fuller in the mouth than Chianti Classico. Manetti’s Pergole Torte was the archetype of the “traditional” Sangiovese Super Tuscan. He sought to challenge Brunello di Montalcino, a zone where 100 percent Sangiovese wine was still being made using traditional techniques.
In 1963, Law 930 established the framework for a DOCG category, to recognize those DOCs that elected to adhere to higher standards. Since August 1970, the Chianti Classico consortium had sought a DOCG, but its hands were tied by its inclusion in the unified Chianti DOC, whose dominant member, the External Chianti consortium, was politically more powerful. In 1980, Brunello di Montalcino became the first DOCG; Vino Nobile di Montepulciano followed in 1981. DOCGs were novel and ignited the interest of wine journalists. The combination of a growing, better traveled, and more educated American middle class with disposable income, a new interest in Tuscany as a center of fashion and culture, increased tourism from the United States because of lower airfares, and finally the increased popularity of Italian cuisine over French cuisine in the U.S. restaurant scene helped fuel interest in quality bottled wine from Italy.
Since the DOCG would give even more value to the denomination of origin, it would be favorable to small and midsize Chianti Classico estates, which lacked the scale and resources to get their wines known in major markets. It would also require lower production yields, almost certainly resulting in higher grape and bulk wine prices in the trade. Therefore, the DOCG was hard to sell to the large merchants. However, by the mid-1970s those in the Chianti Classico consortium, such as Melini and Cecchi, had already invested in vineyards in the zone to ensure stable sources of supply. (During the 1980s, the Marchesi Antinori company purchased its Badia a Passignano and Pèpoli vineyards in Chianti Classico, and Ruffino purchased its Santedame vineyard in Castellina in Chianti.) There was increasing pressure on the Chianti Classico consortium to secure the DOCG distinction. Nonmember producers would also benefit.
As a subzone of the Chianti DOC, Chianti Classico by the early 1980s recognized that it needed to collaborate with External Chianti to secure approval of a Chianti DOCG from Italy’s Ministry of Agriculture. As part of this law, however, it would push for greater distinctions between Chianti Classico and External Chianti. Gualtiero Armando Nunzi, then the vice president of the Chianti Classico consortium, sensed that the political climate was favorable. As he had done in 1967 for the Chianti DOC, he zealously advocated for the Chianti Classico consortium to enter into negotiations with the External Chianti consortia to get an agreement on a framework for a unified Chianti DOCG. Chianti Classico and External Chianti in lockstep won their unified DOCG in 1984. The immediate impacts for Chianti Classico were higher prices for bulk wine sold to the trade, stability in the number of bottles produced, and increased turnover, due to growth in by-the-bottle sales. The bulk price per quintal rose from 46,000 lire in 1980 to 58,000 in 1984 to 150,000 in 1987.31
Besides empowering the Chianti Classico consortium to monitor and protect against misuse of the geographic indication Chianti Classico, the new DOCG gave it responsibility for supervising its members’ adherence to the stricter regulations. However, pursuant to the DOCG legal framework, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture had delegated responsibility for screening finished wines in bottle to local chambers of commerce, which had to assess whether they met the additional chemical and organoleptic requirements of the DOCG regulations. The chambers of commerce for Chianti Classico operated at the provincial level. Since the zone was divided between the provinces of Florence and Siena, the chamber of commerce from each conducted tastings of finished wines for DOCG certification. The Chianti Classico consortium facilitated these tastings by collecting wine samples and hosting the tastings in its offices. Local enologists, for the most part, made up the tasting commissions. Successful entries (nearly all were successful) would have a pink DOCG award band (fascetta) wrapped around the neck of each bottle. The black rooster, once allowed to strut on its own, now had to do so underneath a pink paper halo. Nonmembers of the consortium could deal directly with the chambers of commerce to obtain the DOCG fascetta.
The 1984 vintage was the first to come up for DOCG consideration. It was one of the worst in recorded history for Chianti Classico. Incessant rain and attacks of mold in the vineyards had marked the growing season. Nonetheless, the chambers of commerce passed nearly all the wines for DOCG certification. The Chianti Classico consortium could have been more selective in granting the black rooster seals for these wines. Unfortunately, rather than show the vigilance associated with the black rooster symbol, it gave seals to virtually all of the wines submitted by its members that had already received DOCG approval. The black rooster ceased to represent a higher standard than the law. Italian regulators recognized the consortium’s dual role of both supervising and promoting its members as a conflict of interest, and in 1987 the government required it to split its functions between two consortia. The Chianti Classico consortium continued to fulfill its quality control obligations under the DOCG discipline. Its promotional and marketing activities (including the awarding of the black rooster seals) were transferred to the new Consorzio del Gallo Nero (Black rooster consortium). Though the black rooster neck label had more stringent regulations than the DOCG fascetta (at least on paper), the Consorzio del Gallo Nero so rarely failed wines which had already been awarded DOCG certification that the black rooster seal was nothing more than a badge of paid membership in the new consortium. DOCG certification in effect superseded the black rooster symbol in representing that a wine met the Chianti Classico denomination’s standards of identity and quality. As a result, some members of the Chianti Classico consortium did not enroll in the Consorzio del Gallo Nero, and their membership diverged more over time. However, notwithstanding their legal separation, the same office building housed them both. It was not uncommon for an employee of one consortium to move across the hall to become an employee of the other. The split caused confusion. Chianti Classico had been complicated enough, but even more confusion was to come.
In 1986, the Chianti Classico consortium made a fateful marketing decision. It published a full-page advertisement in Wine Spectator to announce the upcoming birth of the Consorzio del Gallo Nero and promote Chianti Classico wine. The E. and J. Gallo Winery owned the registered trademark Gallo in the United States and had consistently used the word on its wines since 1933. It sent a cease-and-desist letter in early 1987 to the Chianti Classico consortium warning against any further trademark infringement. In 1989 the fledgling Consorzio del Gallo Nero launched its own U.S. marketing campaign, prominently displaying the words Gallo Nero to promote the consortium members’ wines. The Gallo Winery promptly sued in U.S. federal district court. Believing that its historic claims to the Gallo Nero mark trumped the E. and J. Gallo Winery’s trademark rights, the Consorzio del Gallo Nero responded by filing a counterclaim to obtain a declaratory judgment that its use of the word Gallo did not infringe on or dilute the U.S. winery’s trademark rights. The Gallo Winery won the battle in 1991. The Consorzio del Gallo Nero was forced to change its name and cease using the word Gallo in its publications in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, where the Gallo Winery had registered its name as a trademark. Moreover, it had to pay for the Gallo Winery’s legal expenses. However, it could still use its black rooster symbol worldwide. The Consorzio del Gallo Nero changed its name to Consorzio del Marchio Storico Chianti Classico in 1992. Il marchio storico means “the historic mark,” an oblique reference to the black rooster. This defeat must have been salt in the wounds of Chianti Classico. After losing control of the name Chianti to External Chianti decades earlier, it had now lost the right to use the name of its proud standard-bearer, the Gallo Nero, in its most important export markets.
The unified Chianti DOCG allowed each Chianti subzone to set more stringent regulations for itself than the base discipline. Chianti Classico had the most stringent conditions of all: 2 to 5 percent of the white varieties, Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia del Chianti (versus the 5 to 10 percent of the External Chianti subzones), and a minimum alcohol level, 12 percent, higher than the 11.5 percent requirement of the External Chianti subzones. It also had the most stringent yield regulations, seventy-five quintals per hectare (3.3 tons per acre). External Chianti set its requirement at one hundred quintals per hectare (4.5 tons per acre), though the consortia for the Chianti Rufina and Chianti Colli Fiorentini subzones established upper yields of eighty quintals per hectare (3.6 tons per acre). The 1984 varietal recipe stipulated that a Chianti Classico DOCG wine include 75 to 90 percent Sangiovese, 5 to 10 percent Canaiolo Nero, and 2 to 5 percent of Trebbiano Toscano, Malvasia del Chianti, or a mix of the two. Complementary varieties were capped at 10 percent.
While the 1984 DOCG regulations eliminated sales in bulk directly to consumers, which reduced opportunities for fraud, they failed to ban the corrective addition of wine, up to 15 percent, which allowed wine to enter from outside the appellation and the region. Some producers used this loophole to add international varieties to their wines. By 1994, however, the 15 percent corrective addition was disallowed because it was inconsistent with EU regulations.
During the 1980s, consulting enologists, a new breed, made their presence known in the Chianti Classico zone. The new owners of estates were largely unfamiliar with the wine industry. They earned their livelihoods in other sectors. Until now, grower-bottlers had made little attempt to craft wines to meet the tastes of consumers and the growing wine press. The consumer trend then was for more deeply colored, ripe fruit–scented, and concentrated but soft-textured wines. Owners needed consulting enologists to “pull the switches” to make wines approaching this profile—no easy task with Sangiovese. The help could also not be full time, because their operations were small. A part-time consulting enologist was less expensive and could direct a cellar master (cantiniere) who worked full time at the estate but had less technical training.
Vittorio Fiore, Franco Bernabei, and Maurizio Castelli were the most visible members of this generation of consulting enologists. Beginning in the late 1970s, they established high-profile client relationships. By the late 1980s they were so important that the Consorzio del Gallo Nero listed the consulting enologists of members in its catalogue. As wine journalists became opinion leaders in the trade and with consumers, estate owners began using the names of their consulting enologists as calling cards, because this gave their wines instant credibility. In the absence of a present and knowledgeable owner, the name of the consulting enologist was like a brand, a shortcut to understanding the style and quality of the wine.
Sangiovese makes wines lacking in concentration and substantial texture, especially compared with those containing Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot. It is very sensitive to inclement weather because of its delicate, thin skin. The Sangiovese-dominant vineyards planted throughout Chianti Classico in the 1960s and 1970s aimed at quantity, not quality, of production. As a result, most of these vines were poor performers during the 1980s. To compensate for this deficiency, producers planted first Cabernet Sauvignon and then increasing amounts of Merlot in that decade. Cabernet Sauvignon makes wines that are very different from Sangiovese—darker and more vegetal scented, sour, and astringent. In Chianti’s climate, Merlot lacks the vegetal scent, the sourness, and the more persistent astringency of Cabernet. It blends seamlessly with Sangiovese, adding color and soft texture. The 1980s were also when producers, usually on the recommendation of consulting enologists, purchased toasted-oak barriques (225-liter, or 59-gallon, capacity), mostly from France, for maturing their wines. These helped to stabilize the color, gave a toasted-wood aroma (in great demand in the United States), and provided more texture in the mouth.
During this period, Chianti Classico producers had to decide what to do with their white grape vines. Many were Trebbiano or Malvasia. The wine press, consumers, and enologists cried out for their exclusion from the blend. They made the wines pale and thin on the palate and shortened their shelf life. While a group of large merchants proposed to use these varieties in a new white wine type called Galestro, first launched by Antinori in 1977, the Chianti Classico consortium created its own white wine type, Bianco della Lega, the first vintage being the 1981. Both Galestro and Bianco della Lega failed to become popular, and Chianti Classico producers planted red grape vines in place of Trebbiano and Malvasia Bianca.
The infusion of outside capital also spurred Chianti Classico’s adaption to the modern wine world. During the 1980s and even more during the 1990s, wealthy individuals from outside Chianti Classico who had made their fortunes in industries other than wine bought and renovated poderi and fattorie, planted vineyards, built small wineries, and began bottling their own wine in the zone. At the same time, wine merchants there bought properties and vineyards and became proprietor-bottlers themselves. The income of these properties was supplemented by turning their old farm buildings into individual holiday farmhouses called agriturismi (the plural of agriturismo). Subsidies and tax incentives fueled this renewal, which intensified during the wine and tourism boom of the 1990s. The controlled renovation of abandoned buildings protected the historic appearance of the Chianti countryside.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the export market for Chianti Classico wine became more important than the domestic market. Its most important foreign markets were Germany, followed by Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Japan in particular was a growing market. As the U.S. and Japanese currencies were strong against the lira, the Chianti Classico zone also became a tourist attraction for American and Japanese wine consumers who were visiting Florence and its environs. The total yearly production of 280,000 hectoliters (7.4 million gallons; this was the 1992 figure, but production typically oscillated between 250,000 and 300,000 hectoliters, or 6.6 and 7.9 million gallons, per year) met the needs of the market. Production, stock turnover, and sales were in balance. Small independent wine estates were able to find foreign buyers more easily than in previous years, because of the growing worldwide interest in and demand for Tuscan wine. During this decade (particularly its second half) the wine business and associated industries grew rapidly and were increasingly profitable. From 1990 to 1995, the bulk price of Chianti Classico wine rose from one hundred thousand to more than two hundred thousand lire per hectoliter.32 As a result, bottled wine prices rose. Once-abandoned poderi became boutique wineries overnight, which sprung up like wildflowers on the first day of spring.
Because of the positive market situation and availability of credit, growers increasingly abandoned wine cooperatives in order to vinify, bottle, and commercialize their own wines, a trend that continued into the next century. As a result, the cooperative movement stalled and then declined. In 1992, the members of the Chianti Classico consortium accounted for 82 percent of the appellation’s production, while the members of the Marchio Storico promotional consortium accounted for only 49 percent. Not only large estates and merchants such as Antinori and Ruffino but also some of the elite small estates such as Monsanto, Isole e Olena, Castello dei Rampolla, and Castello di Ama elected to stay out of the Marchio Storico consortium, so as to control their own marketing.
The negotiations over the Chianti DOCG in 1984 had been an opportunity for Chianti Classico to further differentiate itself from External Chianti. Then, in 1992, a new piece of wine legislation, Law 164, ushered in a sweeping set of regulations that provided the opening Chianti Classico needed to secure its freedom from External Chianti. In addition to creating the IGT classification—more regulated than vino da tavola, which had previously given legal standing to Super Tuscan wines—Article 5 provided a legal mechanism for classico zones, the original, historic zones on which larger ones were based, to obtain independent appellations, whether at the DOC or the DOCG level. Beyond legalities, Chianti Classico’s representation of the Chianti DOCG in the market more than justified its claim to its own DOCG. In 1992, 82 percent of the Chianti DOCG wine bottled for that year was attributed to and labeled as Chianti Classico.33 Very few producers in the subzones of External Chianti identified their wines by subzone on their labels, instead opting to use just the name Chianti.
In 1996, Italian regulators decreed that Chianti Classico could be an autonomous DOCG. Independence from External Chianti had long been Chianti Classico’s goal. But this gain in independence can also be seen as the final legal loss of its rightful claim to be the one and only Chianti. The divorce meant that the original territory of Chianti—now called Chianti Classico—was no longer part of the wine zone of “Chianti,” while External Chianti would have the exclusive right to the name Chianti for all of its wines (and, in practice, for its vast territory of seven subzones, which today the Consorzio Vino Chianti’s website describes as “the places of Chianti”).34 In 1997, External Chianti shone a spotlight on its control of the Chianti name when it gained the right from the Ministry of Agriculture to use the Superiore (Superior) designation. Ironically, the Consorzio del Gallo had announced its intent to use a Superiore qualification in its amended Statuto of September 20, 1927.35 This official category, secured by External Chianti seventy years later, was a higher level for wines labeled as Chianti DOCG but without a subzone name. The Superiore classification is used in other appellations, such as Valpolicella, Soave, Barbera d’Asti, Verdicchio, Valtellina, Frascati, and Marsala. It haunts Chianti Classico producers, because Superiore connotes higher quality more effectively than Classico, especially in export markets.
Beyond granting Chianti Classico its “independence,” its DOCG discipline made significant changes to the way Chianti Classico wine could be made. Significantly, for the first time it could be 100 percent Sangiovese. Canaiolo could also be eliminated from the blend, as could Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia Bianca. Up to 15 percent of the wine’s vines could be of other red grape varieties allowed in the province of production, whether Florence or Siena, including Tuscan and well-known international varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah. However, varieties that were associated with other regions in Italy, such as Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and Sicily’s Nero d’Avola, were not.
For the first time, a minimum vine density (3,350 per hectare, or 1,356 per acre) was required, for vineyards planted after 1997. The minimum alcohol levels for Chianti Classico and Chianti Classico Riserva were raised by 0.5 percentage points, to 12 and 12.5 percent, respectively. Chianti Classico’s minimum acidity was dropped from 5 to 4.5 parts per million (ppm), an indication of the trends of harvesting at higher levels of ripeness and successfully stabilizing lower-acid wines. The minimum release date was moved from June 1 to October 1 of the year following the harvest, which made fresh, fermentative smells less likely. This was meant to further distinguish Chianti Classico from inexpensive, young External Chianti wines. The aging period (regardless of container) was reduced to two years, a decision that moved Chianti Classico Riserva, which had previously required three years of aging, away from tradition. For the first time, Chianti Classico, in addition to being vinified in the zone, had to be bottled within the appellation. (Ruffino, however, pressed for and won an exception that allows it and other producers who were bottling outside the zone before 1996 to continue to do so.) External Chianti DOCG, on the other hand, can legally be bottled anywhere in the world.
In the rapidly growing global wine market, the influence of the wine consultant increasingly offered assurance of quality and style. During the 1990s, a new generation of consulting enologists entered the Chianti Classico arena, among them Attilio Pagli, Luca D’Attoma, Paolo Vagaggini, Andrea Mazzoni, Gabriella Tani, Nicolò d’Afflitto, Giorgio Marone, Stefano Chioccioli, Alberto Antonini, Paolo Salvi, Federico Staderini, Giovanni Cappelli, and Gioia Cresti. Stefano Porcinai and Lorenzo Landi followed in the next decade. The most visible consultant of this generation was Carlo Ferrini, a former technical director of the Chianti Classico consortium. He secured high-profile clients including Fonterutoli, Brancaia, and Castello di Brolio. The press glamorized these consultants with the epithet “rock star enologist.”
The bulk price of Chianti Classico has historically been tied to the bulk price of External Chianti. The Chianti Classico price is consistently higher than the External Chianti one, but it is an open question whether the premium is large enough to compensate for Chianti Classico’s required lower yields and higher cost of production. From 1996 to 2003, Chianti Classico bulk wine prices soared much higher than those of External Chianti. However, trouble had begun in the new millennium. In the early 2000s, German supermarkets bought less-expensive Australian bulk and bottled wine instead of Italian wine. The dot-com bubble burst in March 2000. September 11, 2001, changed the world’s sense of security about the future. As New York recovered from the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the city (the showcase of Italian wine in the United States) cut back on buying wine. Tourism to Tuscany was temporarily set back. In 2002, an eighteen-month decline in the value of the U.S. dollar, which lost 25 percent of its value against the euro, began to take its toll on U.S. imports of Italian wine. Relationships between U.S. importers and Chianti Classico producers were strained as profit margins for producers based on earlier exchange rates decreased. After January 2003, there was a steep downward trend in the price of Chianti Classico bulk wine, which reached a low of 171 euros per hectoliter ($7.77 per gallon) in January 2006. Its historic high was 497 euros per hectoliter ($22.60 per gallon) in June 2002.36
By 2005, Chianti Classico producers were looking to develop other export markets, such as Poland, Russia, and China. The near-global meltdown of financial markets in mid-to-late 2008, however, immediately impacted Chianti Classico’s exports. As the volume of total annual sales declined, hitting a low in 2009 of 192,496 hectoliters (5.1 million gallons) from a high of 289,741 hectoliters (7.7 million gallons) in 2007, stocks of yet to be certified wines held by merchants and producers in Chianti Classico rose steadily. On the advice of the consortium, members voted to block 20 percent of their 2009 harvest and put the wine in storage for two years before market release. This tactic had been successful in the Champagne region of France. But Champagne is largely a nonvintage product, and its vintage wines that have been blocked in storage can easily be moved to service the nonvintage category at any time. Chianti Classico producers, particularly smaller grower-bottlers, did not have this flexibility, because vintage variations in quantity, quality, and style have more impact on them. The strategy did not work. As the world recovered from the economic recession, the annual sales volume of Chianti Classico began to climb after April 2010, reaching a high of 260,000 hectoliters (6.9 million gallons) in 2012. In 2013 it declined slightly, to 252,094 hectoliters (6.7 million gallons).37 But the amount of Chianti Classico in stock on December 31, 2013, remained too high, at 791,006 hectoliters (20.9 million gallons).
The high ratio of stock to sales that had plagued Chianti Classico in the late 1970s returned to haunt it. The Chianti Classico bulk market is complicated. Of the average annual production of 270,000 to 300,000 hectoliters (7.1 to 7.9 million gallons) of Chianti Classico wine, approximately 35 to 40 percent is sold as bulk wine. Beyond merchants who simply buy, bottle, and sell bulk wine as Chianti Classico, there are many producers who own vineyards in Chianti Classico and, in addition to bottling the wine they make, either sell grapes or wine on the bulk wine market or buy in grapes and bulk wine to bottle and sell. There are two indicators that analysts look at to understand the health of Chianti Classico: the bulk wine price and the amount of Chianti Classico that remains stored and unsold as stock (giacenza) in cellars. Normally there is an inverse relationship between the two indices—the higher the bulk price, the lower the wine in stock, and vice versa. The bulk market is affected by vintage quality; external market forces, such as economic surges and downturns; and internal issues, most importantly supply and demand. Another important internal issue is the two-year delay between the purchase of wine on the bulk market and its sale as bottled wine. Putting aside other market changes, the price paid for Chianti Classico wine in bulk has an impact on the price of the bottled wine when it is sold in the marketplace two years later. Although the market may be primed for an increase in bottle prices, a lower bulk price from two years earlier will act as a drag on the eventual sale price. In addition, the bulk market tends to move in cycles that do not appear directly related to real-time supply and demand market forces. This has made it very difficult to manage for the Chianti Classico consortium.
The fluctuation in the bulk prices of Chianti Classico wine has undermined the economic health of the appellation. From 2005 to 2015, the average bulk price of Chianti Classico remained under 220 euros per hectoliter ($10 per gallon). Two hundred fifty to two hundred seventy-five euros per hectoliter ($11.36 to $12.50 per gallon) is considered the level at which grower-bottlers are able to cover their costs. After a decade of losses, the ability of such grower-bottlers (without outside sources of revenue or fresh capital) to further invest in their estates was eroded. However, the situation has been gradually improving in recent years. In 2013 and 2014 the average bulk price was 169 and 216 euros per hectoliter ($7.68 and $9.81 per gallon), respectively, up from the 2011 and 2012 respective average bulk prices of 146 and 140 euros per hectoliter ($6.64 and $6.36 per gallon). In 2015 the average bulk price remained stable at 221 euros per hectoliter ($10.05 per gallon).
Chianti Classico’s grower-bottlers and merchants keep a watchful eye on the bulk market price of External Chianti wines. While the bulk price of External Chianti has historically been lower than that of Chianti Classico, this differential does not tell the whole story. External Chianti’s production-yield limits are higher than Chianti Classico’s, 9,000 versus 7,500 kilograms per hectare (4 versus 3.3 tons per acre). Hence, for External Chianti, the maximum yield in liquid volume is 63 hectoliters per hectare (674 gallons per acre). For Chianti Classico, it is 52.5 hectoliters per hectare (561 gallons per acre). In 2014, by the estimate of one grower-bottler in Chianti Classico, the income from selling External Chianti bulk wine was 11,214 euros per hectare ($5,448 per acre), compared with 10,500 euros per hectare ($5,101 per acre) for sellers of Chianti Classico (i.e., 714 euros less per Chianti Classico hectare, or $347 per acre). The situation was even worse in 2012 and preceding years.
The fact that Chianti Classico producers (who generally have higher farming costs than External Chianti producers) have been earning less (on average) per hectare than External Chianti producers distresses Chianti Classico producers who depend on selling bulk wine to get cash quickly. This situation has many Chianti Classico producers asking themselves if it was a sound business decision in 1996 to pull away from the unified Chianti DOCG to have their own DOCG. In 2010, this separation went fully into effect.38 Before then, producers in Chianti Classico had had until December 15 after every harvest to make the decision, called the scelta vendemmiale (harvest choice), whether to classify their wine as Chianti Classico or External Chianti (i.e., “Chianti”).
In today’s market, the large merchants and producers in Chianti Classico make more money than small ones, because they have more commercial options. If they own vineyards in or buy grapes or wines from External Chianti (as many do), they can use those grapes or wines to make Chianti DOCG wine, as long as they follow the processing regulations of its discipline. These producers have a hybrid business model of selling both Chianti Classico and External Chianti wine to boost their profit margins, depending on differences in bulk prices and other market factors between the two appellations. This commercial reality is at odds with the aspirations of and pressures on small and medium grower-bottlers of Chianti Classico. It lies at the root of the debate among members of the consortium regarding fundamental issues impacting Chianti Classico’s identity. As of 2015, there were seventy members of the Chianti Classico consortium (of a total of 376 bottlers) who sold both Chianti Classico and External Chianti wine. At least for these seventy (many of whom are high-profile names), it could be fairly said that they want to sell their Chianti and have their Chianti Classico too.
In keeping with modern marketing strategies, the Chianti Classico consortium in 2013 created an independent sister company, the Chianti Classico Co., to promote the “Chianti Classico lifestyle” and generate revenue by licensing its black rooster trademark for fashion, athletic, and wine-related merchandise. The Chianti Classico Co., working with the consortium’s nonprofit Fondazione per la Tutela del Territorio (Foundation for the protection of the territory [of Chianti Classico]), has energized the cultural and educational initiatives at the consortium’s restored convent in Radda: the former Santa Maria al Prato convent, now called Casa Chianti Classico (House of Chianti Classico), that since 2014 has housed a wine school, rotating art and photography gallery, and shop showcasing the wines of its member estates. It is the center for the consortium’s special events in the historic heart of the appellation. The Chianti Classico Co. has also launched an upscale enoteca (wine shop) in Florence, on the recently renovated upper floor of the Mercato Centrale (Central market) near the Church of San Lorenzo.
In 2003, the Italian government put the Chianti Classico consortium on a path to strengthening its authority. If all went as planned, it would be permitted to absorb the marketing and promotional functions that the Consorzio del Marchio Storico was carrying out. And indeed, in December 2004 their members voted to merge, with the Chianti Classico consortium as the surviving organization. The merger was effective as of June 2005. From then until 2010 the Chianti Classico consortium was also authorized to conduct all of the regulatory controls imposed by the Chianti Classico DOCG discipline, except for the final organoleptic test, which was still the responsibility of the provincial chambers of commerce.
But all was not well. During the late 1990s, satellite photos had revealed that of eight thousand hectares (19,768 acres) registered for wine production in Chianti Classico, only six thousand (14,826 acres) actually existed. Two thousand hectares (4,942 acres) of forested land had been registered as official Chianti Classico vineyards. The legal documentation, or “paper,” that officially and fallaciously declared the yields for these two thousand hectares could be sold for handsome (and ill-gotten) gains on the black market and then attached to cheap bulk wine from anywhere to legalize its sale as Chianti Classico. In October 2005, trust was publicly shattered when newspapers printed the story of a Radda-based wine merchant who was arrested for blending wine from outside the region with his inventory of Chianti Classico. Because of this illegal compromise of Chianti Classico wine, the police sequestered seventy thousand hectoliters (1.8 million gallons) of Chianti Classico DOCG, about one-quarter of the zone’s yearly production. In April 2006, on the eve of Vinitaly, Italy’s biggest trade fair, the scandal known as Brunellogate in the United States and Brunellopoli in Italy broke. There were accusations that many Brunello di Montalcino producers were not bottling 100 percent Sangiovese wines as required by their DOCG discipline. Though the spotlight was on Montalcino, producers in Chianti Classico were also nervous. Was there cause for concern in their appellation?
In late 2006, six prominent Chianti Classico producers sent a letter to the consortium complaining about the overuse of authorized ameliorative red varieties or the use of unauthorized red varieties in Chianti Classico wine, the increase in illegal blending of Chianti Classico with wines from outside the region, and the tendency of tasting commissions (composed of consulting and full-time enologists within Chianti Classico) to favor dark, very ripe wines.39 It was no secret that a significant amount of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Syrah were planted throughout the zone, more than what the law allowed. Unauthorized red varieties from the south of Italy were also suspected of having been planted in the appellation, for darkening or spicing up wines. Among producers in Chianti Classico there were (and still are) many stories about dark and ripe wines (with little resemblance to Sangiovese) passing the tasting commission’s organoleptic test, while light-colored and sour wines (typical examples of cool vintage Sangiovese) failed. In response, the consortium expanded its inspection network to fulfill its duty of guaranteeing the adherence of Chianti Classico producers to all applicable regulations. One inspector’s job was to make sure that what was planted in producers’ vineyards conformed to their declarations. Because a 2002 modification of the production code had raised the minimum percentage of Sangiovese in the blend from 75 to 80, the amount of Sangiovese being planted throughout the appellation was a particular focus. Minor infractions were easily correctable. Larger ones were not. There were rumors that a high-profile producer had bought a vineyard or vineyards with a high percentage of Sangiovese to offset its excessive plantings of Merlot. Chianti Classico’s producers must have breathed a collective sigh of relief that they had not taken the 100 percent Sangiovese pledge of Montalcino’s producers. Nevertheless, lessons were learned.
In August 2009, EU policies mandated that independent, privately owned, EU-certified organizations conduct organoleptic examinations of all EU wines, collect data on their vineyards, and inspect their vineyards for compliance with appellation law. In 2010, Valoritalia, which has a national presence in Italy, took over these functions for the Chianti Classico consortium. (As of 2015, its principal office in Tuscany shared the building and some of the work spaces of the consortium.) The consortium presently focuses primarily on promotion, marketing, and protecting the Chianti Classico name and trademarks throughout the world. It also conducts tasting checks on bottles labeled as Chianti Classico that have been released into commerce. One reason is to ensure that they contain Chianti Classico wine and not wine from another source.
In 2010, the Chianti Classico consortium became the first consortium of wine producers in Italy to attain the stature to regulate erga omnes (“toward all” in Latin). Because it met the criteria of representing more than two-thirds of the producers in Chianti Classico and had demonstrated the ability to enforce the DOCG regulations and promote and protect the appellation, the Italian government appointed it the sole legal representative of all Chianti Classico producers. Whether or not producers are members of the consortium, therefore, they are required to pay a fee for its services. Consequently, there was little reason for them not to join. In 2012, the Marchesi Antinori company returned after a thirty-eight-year hiatus. A handful of unwavering holdouts remain, including Montevertine in Radda, Castello dei Rampolla in Panzano, and Le Boncie in Castelnuovo Berardenga. With the attainment of erga omnes authority, the consortium has increased its power and influence. Giuseppe Liberatore, in his role as the director of the Chianti Classico consortium, was the architect of the national erga omnes law.
As of June 2014, a regulation adopted by the consortium mandated that every year, wines of the most recent vintage that were intended to be sold as Chianti Classico (known as atto a divenire Chianti Classico, “designated to become Chianti Classico”) could no longer be sold in bulk without being certified. This certification involves an organoleptic analysis, including a tasting examination to ensure eligibility (idoneità) as a Chianti Classico wine. Once issued, the certification must travel with the bulk wine. If the wine is blended with another lot of Chianti Classico, it has to pass DOCG inspection again before going on the market. Before this reform, Chianti Classico wine could be moved in bulk without any paper trail, increasing the possibility of fraud. The previous system also allowed bulk wine to be sold without any assurance that it was well made. The new law has had the effects of providing upward price support for Chianti Classico bulk wine and making the bulk market more stable. The fact that the wine has passed the tasting assessment makes it more valuable in the eyes of the buyer, giving sellers more bargaining power.
At the end of 2014, the Chianti Classico consortium made it mandatory for all of its members to display the black rooster trademark on every bottle of their Chianti Classico wine. The mark can appear either in its traditional perch, on the front of the neck, or, less conspicuously, on the back label. Typically, producers who believe that the black rooster strengthens their image display it on the front of the bottle, while those who seek to emphasize their estates’ identity and branding place it on the back.
Small producers in the consortium usually characterize its debates as struggles between themselves and much larger producers and merchants. While most producers in the consortium are small, ten companies account for 44 percent of the volume of Chianti Classico wine. The consortium’s members do not have equal numbers of votes: each is given one per three hundred hectoliters (7,925 gallons) of production. The consortium proudly points to this weighted voting structure as a compromise between a one member, one vote policy, which would heavily favor small producers, and the allocation of votes purely on the basis of actual volume of production, which would favor large producers even more. It also prides itself on its transparency and corporate governance. Members have access to the minutes of all meetings of members and of the board of directors, and they voted on the introduction of the Gran Selezione category and on all of the recent reforms of the Chianti Classico DOCG discipline at the consortium’s annual meeting (typically held in May or June and known as the Assemblea).
Until 2003, the provinces of Siena and Florence made the official determination of complementary vine varieties authorized for Chianti Classico wine. After 2003, the region of Tuscany took over this function. It had a longer list than the provinces, more than forty varieties in all. This opened the door to many more possible ways to enhance Chianti Classico. Petit Verdot, among others, was authorized for the first time. On the other hand, beginning with the 2006 vintage, it was illegal to use Trebbiano, Malvasia Bianca, or any other white variety in a Chianti Classico blend.40
More significant, the perception of what a fine Chianti Classico should look, smell, and taste like has evolved. Particularly from the 1990s until Brunellogate, the model for great Chianti Classico was the Bordeaux-influenced style of the respected French enologist Émile Peynaud (and his disciple Tachis): dark color, ripe and woody smell, and a high-extract texture but smooth palate. Pale and delicate wines rarely do well in mixed double-blind tastings, at which darker, more alcoholic, softer-textured, and more concentrated wines nearly always rank higher. Since Brunellogate, however, wine journalists and producers have reassessed how Sangiovese wines should taste, and there is a growing acceptance of pale and elegant Chianti Classico.
On January 29, 2014, a new Chianti Classico DOCG discipline went into effect. The principal change was the addition of a category at the top of the quality pyramid, Gran Selezione (Great selection). The Chianti Classico consortium’s description states that “the Gran Selezione is made exclusively from a winery’s own grapes grown in its finest vineyards according to strict regulations that make it a truly premium wine, the new point of reference on the world wine scene.”41 The language of the law is more flexible, requiring only that the vineyards be either owned or managed by the producer, who may hire another company to bottle the wine. Therefore, a producer could lease and manage vineyards anywhere in the appellation, then hire another company to bottle his finished wine after vinification and maturation. The law was devised with the intent that the wine producer be in complete control of the viticulture. It is in this sense that Gran Selezione is wine made from estate-grown fruit. The architects of the new category hope that Gran Selezione will become more prestigious than Super Tuscans. The revised DOCG discipline defines technical parameters for the three tiers within the Chianti Classico appellation: Chianti Classico annata, Chianti Classico Riserva, and Chianti Classico Gran Selezione. The annata is the primary tier of Chianti Classico wine (though the DOCG law does not define annata, the consortium and producers use the word to signify that a given wine is not a Riserva or Gran Selezione Chianti Classico). Formerly, the descriptor normale (normal) was used for the base Chianti Classico, but it was likely replaced because it was considered pejorative. Annata must have a minimum alcohol level of 12 percent and a minimum dry extract level of twenty-four grams per liter (3.2 ounces per gallon), Riserva 12.5 percent and twenty-five grams per liter (3.3 ounces per gallon), and Gran Selezione 13 percent and twenty-six grams per liter (3.5 ounces per gallon). Gran Selezione must also be aged for thirty months, six more than the requirement for the Riserva category. One of the challenges for the outside tasting commission appointed to approve Gran Selezione samples (prior to release) is the absence of purposively defined organoleptic parameters that distinguish it from Riserva or annata. Some winegrowers have complained that the wines that consistently pass the tasting commission’s scrutiny are still those that are darker in color and softer and thicker in the mouth, characteristics not typical of Sangiovese wine.
The Gran Selezione category has created a great deal of discussion within the appellation. The initial concept of the law was that it would focus on the vineyard. However, once the larger producers got involved in the deliberations, an elite product category more connected to a producer’s identity than to distinct growing environments took shape. Smaller estates were more inclined to embrace the vineyard idea. Prestigious larger producers such as Castello di Ama had also championed the single-vineyard concept. For certain winegrowers in Chianti Classico who have already been producing single-vineyard (or single-place) or 100 percent Sangiovese wines in either the Riserva or the annata category, the creation of the Gran Selezione category is an operazione di facciata, window dressing, rather than a substantive step forward for the denomination.
It was unfortunate that in the first release of Gran Selezione, large producers who had unsold stocks of high-quality wine targeted to be released as Riservas were in the best position to make use of the press attention and the consortium’s marketing support. At the Chianti Classico Gran Selezione inaugural event in February 2014 in Florence, of the thirty-three estates that presented a wine, the following six released in the aggregate 900,000 bottles, or 82 percent of the category: Ruffino (500,000 bottles), Brolio (108,000, split 88,000–20,000 between two labels), Castello di Ama (100,000), Antinori (92,000), Castello di Fonterutoli (60,000), and San Felice (40,000). The remaining twenty-seven estates accounted for 195,100 bottles, or 18 percent of the category. Large producers clearly have enough resources to support another product tier. Small producers who previously made annata and Riserva might be forced to sacrifice their Riserva to make a Gran Selezione in order to have an entry at the top of Chianti Classico’s new quality pyramid.
In the early 1980s, the American author and wine journalist Burton Anderson, who was living in Tuscany, set up a wine tasting for the Chianti Classico consortium. He organized it by the township of origin of each wine. So much controversy surrounded this idea that the consortium decided to abandon the approach after that tasting. Historically, the subzone topic was taboo within the consortium, because of a fear that wine journalists would rank subzones based on what they perceived as the potential of the terroir or on how successful the producers in each were on average in garnering critics’ points. The last thing the consortium wanted to do was to set up or endorse a system that favored some members over others.
In the months before and after the February 2014 coming-out party for Chianti Classico Gran Selezione, there was a resurgence of debate about the subzone issue. It was triggered by the frustration of smaller producers who believed that the new category, a commercial product class largely unrelated to terroir, was simply another manifestation of the taboo against showcasing subzone differences. Their immediate question was, why should townships not be identified to consumers? There were advantages to doing so. It would create differentiation in the marketplace, encouraging more placements on store shelves and more entries in wine lists. Among producers, it would help to create township self-identity. In the Chianti Classico appellation, township names have traditionally been allowed on the front label only in minuscule letters, in the winery address. Many winegrowers are advocating for laws that would allow township names to be printed in a large font on front labels. This would be a first step toward identifying zones within Chianti Classico for the trade and consumers. Whether township labeling should be accompanied by appellation regulations or whether it should be just a menzione geografica (geographical indication), an identification of origin, is a complex issue. Certainly the latter would be easier to implement. So easy that we cannot help but exclaim, “Why not?” Some larger producers suggest that only the Gran Selezione category should be allowed the privilege of using township identification, while others believe it should be the start of a gradual phasing in, from the top of the quality pyramid down. Geographic origin should not, however, be tied to particular commercial categories, such as annata, Riserva, and Gran Selezione. It should apply to all categories of Chianti Classico. The movement to township labeling has gathered momentum on the ground in the past couple of years. Taking inspiration from Panzano’s well-established union of winegrowers, the Unione Viticoltori di Panzano in Chianti, producers in Castelnuovo Berardenga and San Casciano in Val di Pesa have organized their own member associations (Classico della Berardenga and Viticoltori del Chianti Classico Sancascianese, respectively) to define and promote their zones. The idea of place should be protected and promoted in Chianti. If there were ever an appellation that should understand this concept, it is Chianti Classico.
In 2014, the Frescobaldi wine company announced that it was renting approximately sixty hectares (148 acres) of vineyards from Castello di San Donato in Perano, a prized property straddling the Radda-Gaiole border. A year later, the Antinori wine company announced that it had purchased eighty-five hectares (210 acres) of vineyards in the historic San Sano area of Gaiole. The Frescobaldi company is a long-standing member of the External Chianti consortium. It makes Chianti Rufina at its headquarters at Nipozzano near Pontassieve. The Antinori wine company, located in San Casciano, flirted with the consortia of both the Gallo and the Putto during the 1920s and largely disassociated its products from Chianti Classico in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It has since joined the Chianti Classico consortium. It is hard to pierce through the corporate veils of these two companies. One can only imagine that there exists a fierce rivalry between these two ancient Florentine families, particularly since the Frescobaldis wrested the Ornellaia property in Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast from Lodovico Antinori (via the Robert Mondavi wine company and then Constellation Brands). The entry of these two companies into the heart of historic Chianti signals the important role that they believe Chianti Classico will have in future years. It remains a battleground.