A lot of people think that the relevant history of Italian wine began ten years ago. Or maybe twenty. To some extent this is true: The last two decades have been a revolutionary period in Italian winemaking. Thanks to dramatic improvements in technology and viticulture, world-class wines can now be found all over Italy, not just in a handful of regions. In fact, when talking to producers, we hear over and over how 1990 was a watershed year for them—the year when the wine world really began to take Italy seriously.
What’s so special about 1990? For one thing, it was one of the best vintages of the last century. But it was more than that. As many Italian winemakers explain it, ’90 was great not only because of the weather but because of the changes that were already afoot in their cellars and vineyards.
It’s not that there weren’t great wines in Italy before 1990. You can trace legendary vintages of estate-bottled Italian wine almost as far back as you can Bordeaux: There’s the 1928 Bertani “Acinatico” Amarone, ’47 Giacomo Borgogno Barolo, ’55 Biondi-Santi Brunello di Montalcino, ’61 Gaja Barbaresco, ’82 Giacosa “Santo Stefano” Barbaresco. These wines were so naturally blessed that they wouldn’t necessarily have benefited from modern technology. But these historic bottlings were the exceptions, not the rule. As a source of reliable, high-quality wines at all price tiers, from every region, Italy didn’t come into its own until very recently.
The eighties and nineties marked a big generational shift in Italian winemaking. The post–World War II farmer or entrepreneur with limited training and a penchant for industrial-scale production gave way to a son or a daughter, often fresh out of enology school, who transformed the family property into more of a château. This shift wasn’t just idealistic but economically necessary. The Italian government and the European Union invested heavily in new vineyards in the sixties and seventies, and although this helped revive Italy’s flagging agricultural economy at the time, it also resulted in huge surpluses of wine. The EU then tried to reduce these surpluses by compelling vintners to send some of their grapes to huge industrial distilleries, or by paying growers to rip up vines and plant something else. Italy was for a long time a welfare state for wine. Vintners continued to produce more than the market would bear, knowing that they’d get at least something for the extra; occasionally they just lived off the subsidies they got to let their land lay fallow, since planting other crops wasn’t necessarily profitable.
The production excesses of the seventies and early eighties gave Italy a bad reputation among serious wine drinkers. However, as has been the case elsewhere in Europe, Italy’s wine economy has evolved as the international wine market has matured. A culture of mass production has given way to a culture of artisanship and entrepreneurship.
Throughout Italy, it’s a familiar story: The father had some vineyard land and made his living selling grapes to a local cooperative winery. But now his children are replanting those vineyards, building a cellar, buying new oak barrels for aging and vinification, and producing high-end wine under their own label.
Among the longer-established estates, vintners often pinpoint the year they switched from “old style” to new: the year they replaced their thirty-year-old, 50-hectoliter chestnut casks with new, 225-liter French oak barriques; the year they began “green harvesting” grapes in midsummer, so that their vines wouldn’t over-produce; the year they bought their first “roto-fermenter,” a space-age vessel that speeds up the process of extracting color and tannin from red grapes. These types of changes have been overwhelmingly recent—if not always welcome by Italian wine purists. On the whole, Italian winemakers are producing cleaner, more full-bodied, more oak-influenced wines than in the past, which has helped them in the international market—but has also caused some traditionalists to lament their loss of individuality.
The ancient history of Italian wine is much more romantic: the Etruscans training wild vines up trees, the Greeks bringing seeds across the Adriatic and more or less creating Italian viticulture. But as a modern-day consumer looking for a bottle of Italian wine in a shop or a restaurant, you need not look much further back than World War II. There was a thriving wine industry in Italy before then, but very few Italian producers sold wines as we know them today—in bottles, with labels identifying who made them and where they came from.
When the merchants of Bordeaux created their famous 1855 classification—which ranked sixty established châteaus on the basis of price and quality—Italy wasn’t yet a unified country. Italian winemaking at that time was defined by the tenuta: a vast farm estate, often controlled by a noble family, on which a number of mezzadri (sharecroppers) lived and worked. The mezzadria system, which prevailed throughout central and northern Italy up until the 1950s, was a culture in which the sharecropper made a little wine for himself and turned over the rest of his grapes (and portions of all his other produce) to the landowner as rent. The landlord vinified his sharecroppers’ grapes in a central winery called a fattoria and typically sold it in bulk. In the south of Italy was the more oppressive latifondo system, in which peasants had no vested interests in the large landed estates.
After World War II, things began to change, and fast. Italy transformed itself from a monarchy to a republic, and its new government tried to redistribute Italy’s land to the peasant population. Large estates in the south were broken up, and many landowners in the center and north were compelled to sell off parcels to their assorted mezzadri. But the Agrarian Reform, as it was called, didn’t go far enough: Not only was the system of redistributing land hopelessly corrupt, the parcels the government eventually doled out were usually too small to do any one farmer much good.
Despite the Agrarian Reform—or perhaps because of it—rural Italians began leaving home in droves in the mid-fifties, emigrating to other countries or moving to one of the big cities of northern Italy (Turin and Milan especially) to find work. According to historian Paul Ginsborg, in his book A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988, more than 9 million Italians were involved in “interregional migration” between 1951 and 1971.
A twentieth-century industrial expansion in Italy took hold incredibly fast. By the early sixties Italy was among the world’s largest producers of washing machines, refrigerators, and cars, and only 30 percent of the population was still involved in agriculture; today that figure is less than 10 percent. Says Ginsborg: “In less than two decades Italy ceased to be a peasant country and became one of the major industrial nations of the West.”
This “rural exodus” affected winemaking in a number of ways. For one, scores of wine farms were being sold or simply abandoned because there was no one left to work on them. This prompted a new class of entrepreneurs, most of them businesspeople and many of them foreigners, who snapped up these distressed or abandoned properties for weekend getaways. Eventually, these nonfarmers helped reshape the Italian wine business into a real business. Look at the current roster of cantina owners in Chianti Classico, for example, and you’ll see not only a number of famous Italian industrialists but plenty of Swiss and British ones as well—not to mention doctors, lawyers, and advertising execs, all of whom turned their hobbies into enterprises.
In 1963, the Italian government drew up the Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) laws, which created legally defined production zones and production formulas for what were once simple farmhouse wines. Modeled after French wine appellations (see “La Légge”) DOCs were seen as a first step in creating a commercial identity for Italian wines. Concurrent with the DOC implementation, however, were the ongoing efforts of the Italian government and the EU to prop up the agricultural sector. The “Green Plans” of 1961 and 1966 financed massive plantings of various crops throughout Italy, although they tended to focus on the most fertile sites on the plains—not the best places for vines. The sixties and seventies became the era of mass production, and of the cooperative winery, or cantina sociale.
The first co-ops in Italy were actually formed back in the mid-1800s, and multiplied after the turn of the century under the dual influences of the Catholic church and socialism. These early cantine sociali were born in an era when wine production was concentrated in very few private hands, when growers found themselves starving because of the cartel-like conditions of the wine markets. By contrast, the rash of new cooperatives in the sixties and seventies had the feel of pork-barrel public works projects, since many were financed and run by local governments. The main function of these cantine was to be a sponge for a lot of excess juice, and to produce lots of (often excess) wine. Watery Soave, fizzy Lambrusco, and acrid Chianti became Italy’s best-known exports, as the cantine sociali helped flood the market.
Even now, people talk about watery Soave and acrid Chianti—and, unfortunately, still drink them sometimes. And it is true that Italy is still a major producer of bulk wines and concentrated grape musts, particularly in Puglia and Sicily, which ship tanker loads of vino da taglio (cutting wine) to producers in northern Italy and beyond. Yet Puglia and Sicily, traditionally the two most prolific wine-producing regions in Italy, are perhaps the two best examples of how the market has changed. Whereas vast wine surpluses were once the norm, the EU has for some time now restricted the planting of new vineyards, while also supporting the “vine pull” plans that reduced overall vineyard area in Europe by more than 10 percent in the last decade alone. Add to this a general gravitation among consumers toward higher-quality wines, and you’ve got an explanation for why Puglia and Sicily have seen the most dramatic production decreases in recent times. Both regions have reduced production by nearly 40 percent since 1992, although the amount of DOC-classified wine they are producing continues to increase.
Overall, total vineyard area in Italy has been reduced by more than a third in the last twenty years. Of the 50 million hectoliters of wine now produced yearly in Italy (more than a billion gallons), about 23 percent of it is classified with a DOC designation, compared with just 5 percent in 1988. As we discuss on the following pages, a DOC is no guarantee of quality, but Italy has nevertheless reduced the amount of vino da tavola (table wine) it makes while increasing its production of “classified” wine. These days, the EU gives subsidies to vintners who restructure their existing vineyards to produce better-quality grapes, rather than simply buy everything and send the excess to a distillery. And many DOC production formulas—that is, the recipes vintners must follow in order to label their wines with a DOC designation—have been revised in recent times to reflect a greater emphasis on quality. The Chianti Classico DOC, which was extensively rewritten in both 1984 and 1996, is probably the most famous example.
Furthermore, the number of small- and medium-size Italian wineries seems to increase every day: countless wineries profiled in this book, for example, produced their first vintage in the nineties. No longer is great Italian wine found only in Piedmont and Tuscany. The whites of Friuli–Venezia Giulia—which, truth be told, have been great since the seventies—have become genuinely fashionable in the United States. In Sicily, once the undisputed champ of bulk-wine production, vintners have been ripping up big-production white grapes and planting the native red, nero d’avola, along with other reds like syrah and cabernet sauvignon. Sicily, in fact, has provided more than its share of fuel to the Italian wine renaissance in America, since its intensely hot and dry climate produces wines with a soft, fruity, decidedly New World sensibility.
In Puglia, the native primitivo grape has benefited from its proven relation to American red zinfandel. The soft, plush reds from this grape are some of the best values to be found in Italy. There are also many excellent, well-priced reds to be found in the Marche (Rosso Cònero and scores of “super-red” blends), Umbria (the wines of Montefalco), and Abruzzo (Montepulciano d’Abruzzo). On the white side, the Veneto’s much-maligned Soave has been elevated by producers like Gini, Pieropan, Inama, and Anselmi, while farther north the winemakers of Trentino–Alto Adige are quietly turning out some of the best aromatic whites to be found anywhere in the world.
Without a doubt, the most exciting thing about Italian wine is its diversity. There are Italian sparklers, especially from Lombardy’s Franciacorta region, that can stand toe-to-toe with Champagne. There are dessert wines, like Friuli’s rare Picolit, that rival Sauternes. There are ethereal Barolos and Barbarescos that can take on the best of Burgundy. Cabernet blends from Tuscany to compare with Bordeaux. Friuli and Alto Adige whites that eclipse Alsace. Then there are countless Italian wines that defy comparison: Tuscany’s reds from sangiovese, Friuli’s whites from tocai, Basilicata’s and Campania’s reds from aglianico, and many others.
And if recent statistics are any indication, you’re not alone in your search for new and exciting Italian wines. In making revisions for this edition, one of the most striking facts we came across was this: While per capita consumption of wine has actually declined in Italy in recent years, it continues to grow in the United States, albeit marginally. Couple this with the recent run of excellent vintages in Italy (between 1997 and 2004, the only real dud was 2002, and the period from 1997 to 2001 included some of Italy’s best years of all time), and it seems like this is a great moment in time for Italian wine. As you peruse this book, we hope you’ll get as caught up in this moment as we have.