Tuscany (Toscana)

Tuscany is the most photographed landscape in wine and one of the least understood. Behind the cypresses and the hill towns is a region two-thirds hills and only nine per cent flat, geologically fractured, and capable of producing wines that differ completely within a few hundred metres of each other.

The Landscape A quarter of the region is mountain — mostly the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, plus the Apuan Alps above Massa and Carrara, the Colline Metallifere inland from the coast, the Monte Amiata massif in the south, and Monte Falterona, where the Arno rises. Elba, Giglio and Montecristo belong to it too. The climate splits sharply: the Maremma coast averages 18–20°C and the Argentario sees barely 500mm of rain a year, while the Apennine flank from the Apuan Alps to the Casentino can take 2,000mm. Inland, the Valdarno and Val di Chiana swing from 40°C summer highs to winters below zero.

The Ground Viticulture here has developed on two kinds of rock: the macigno sandstone, and the Plio-Pleistocene sandy clays. Chianti Classico occupies the hills between Florence and Siena, bounded by the Valdarno, the Elsa valley, the Pesa and the Arbia, on an intricate weave of alberese limestone, flaky galestro marl, sand and silt, with the Chianti Mountains rising to 800 metres along its spine. Soils change within a few hundred metres, and so do the wines — the most elegant come off ground with little clay and silt, the most structured off sodic clay. Montalcino, not a large zone, packs in marl, palombino, clay and both lake and marine sands. The Val d’Orcia and Val di Chiana, where Vino Nobile sits, are more uniform: Pliocene marine clays and sands.

Etruscan Business Vitis vinifera is documented in Etruria from the eighth century BC, and by the end of the seventh Tuscany was running a serious wine export trade into neighbouring territories. It survived the Roman centuries and then collapsed in the late third century BC, when the spread of the latifundia — vast slave-worked estates — reorganised the countryside and pushed quality out of it. That pattern, of a landscape repeatedly remade by whoever owned it, has repeated more than once since.

The Grapes Sangiovese is the region and very nearly the whole argument. It is late-ripening, thin-skinned, ferociously site-sensitive and clonally various enough to taste like several different grapes depending on where it stands. Its traditional partners are Canaiolo, Colorino, Ciliegiolo and Mammolo. For whites there is Vernaccia di San Gimignano — a variety with no relation to the other Vernaccias, and genetically the Ligurian Piccabon — alongside Trebbiano Toscano, Vermentino on the coast and Ansonica on the islands. Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah arrived on the Maremma coast in the twentieth century and are now native in all but name.

The Critical Take The Super Tuscan revolt of the 1970s is over, and Sangiovese won. What looked like a permanent argument about international varieties turned into a footnote: Bolgheri became its own thing, excellent and Bordeaux-shaped, while everywhere else the serious work went back to Sangiovese and towards site. Chianti Classico’s move to map its villages as UGAs is the clearest sign of that. The problems now are commercial. Brunello is expensive and inconsistent at the bottom of its range, generic Chianti still does reputational damage in supermarkets, and the gap between the best and the ordinary here is wider than in any other famous Italian region.

At the Table Bistecca alla fiorentina, obviously, but also ribollita and panzanella, pappardelle with hare or wild boar, cacciucco on the coast, pecorino di Pienza, and bread made without salt because the wine supplies the rest. Sangiovese’s acidity and grip are built for exactly this food.

Where to Start A Chianti Classico from a single estate, then the same producer’s Riserva or Gran Selezione, teaches more about Sangiovese than any amount of reading. From there, Brunello for power, Vino Nobile for the middle ground, and Morellino di Scansano for what the grape does when it is warm and unhurried.