For roughly two decades, two of the most expensive red wines in Italy carried the same legal classification as the jug wine sold by the liter at a roadside trattoria. Vino da tavola, or table wine. The bottom of the Italian wine hierarchy, the category with no origin, no vintage guarantee, no claim to anything.
Sassicaia was table wine, as was Tignanello. Collectors were paying first-growth money for bottles the Italian state considered unworthy of naming their own villages.
That gap between what the law said and what was in the glass is the whole story of Super Tuscan wine, and it started with a recipe in the 1860s.
The Rule
In the 1860s, Baron Bettino Ricasoli worked out a formula for Chianti at his estate at Brolio. The Baron wasn't particularly traditional about crafting the blend, however. He had travelled to France and Germany to study grape varieties, brought several home, and planted them to see what happened. His conclusion was that Sangiovese, Canaiolo, and Malvasia made the best wine on his plot of land.
The formula ran Sangiovese for structure and perfume, Canaiolo to soften it, and a measure of white Malvasia Bianca for further softening. It was a recipe for wine meant to be drunk within a year or two of harvest, and Ricasoli said as much: in wine intended for the cellar, he wrote, the Malvasia could be left out entirely. In other words, wine with Malvasia in the blend was not meant for the cellar.
A century later, when Italy built its appellation system, somebody wrote the recipe into law. The 1967 Chianti DOC required between 10 and 30 percent of Malvasia and Trebbiano in the blend. White grapes, mandatory, in red wine. The man who devised the formula had said to leave them out of anything worth ageing. The law required them anyway.
Even worse, Trebbiano had largely displaced Malvasia by the 1960s, and Trebbiano brings far less to the party. A technique for making young wine drinkable had become a requirement to dilute a serious wine.
The law also made no allowance for Bordelais varieties (Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot, in this case). Cabernet has been in Tuscany for over two centuries. Carmignano producers were blending it with Sangiovese in the eighteenth century. In fact, Carmignano’s long history with the grape is precisely why it became one of the first Tuscan DOCs permitted to use Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. Elsewhere in Tuscany, those grapes had no appellation within which to live.
Therefore, a producer in Chianti faced a choice. Follow the rules and water down the wine or make the wine as the earth demanded and be demoted to table wine.
Sassicaia and the Tuscan Coast
The first man to shrug at this was not trying to make a point. Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta planted Cabernet Sauvignon at Tenuta San Guido, in Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast, in 1944. Bolgheri had no appellation of any kind at the time and essentially no reputation for red wine. The Marchese liked Bordeaux, thinking that the gravelly ground near Castiglioncello resembled Graves, and naturally made wine for himself there.
A persistent story holds that the cuttings at Sassicaia came from Château Lafite. The Marchese’s son, Nicolò, has said otherwise; rather, that they came off fifty-year-old vines on a friend’s estate near Pisa. Certainly a less romantic origin, but a more believable one. The name is similarly unglamorous. Sassicaia comes from sasso, stone, for ground too rocky to be worth much.
The Marchese made Sassicaia for the family table for roughly twenty years. Nicolò and his cousin, a young Piero Antinori, eventually convinced him to sell it to the wider public. The 1968 vintage was the first released commercially, in 1971, in a few thousand bottles, with Giacomo Tachis consulting. Pure Bordeaux grapes grown on the Tuscan coast, legally table wine because no other category existed for it.
Giacomo Tachis is the thread through this history of Super Tuscans. The same enologist working with the Marchese Mario Incisa on Sassicaia was about to do something comparable inland, for Mario’s nephew, Piero Antinori.
The Tignanello Vineyard
Piero Antinori’s family had been in the wine business since 1385, when Giovanni di Piero Antinori joined the Florentine winemakers’ guild. Twenty-six generations gave him both more to lose and more license to do as he liked.
The Tignanello estate lies in the heart of Chianti Classico, on the hillsides between the Greve and Pesa valleys, about forty miles northeast of Bolgheri. That distance is the whole difference between the two stories of Sassicaia and Tignanello. The Marchese had no appellation to which to answer; Antinori was working inside one.
Tignanello’s first vintage is reported as 1970 and as 1971, both of which are defensible. In 1970, Antinori bottled a single parcel of the Tignanello estate as Chianti Classico Riserva Vigneto Tignanello. The following year he stopped calling it Chianti. The 1971 vintage became simply Tignanello, a Tuscan red table wine, and from there the changes accumulated. The 1975 vintage dropped white grapes entirely. Cabernet came in. The wine went into small French barriques, which no Tuscan producer had done with Sangiovese before.
By 1982, the blend had settled into the Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc formula it still uses. Antinori had taken a Chianti Classico vineyard, made a wine from it that could not be called Chianti Classico, and watched the market pay more for it than for anything he could legally label.
The authorities had demoted both Sassicaia and Tignanello to the lowest rung in Italian wine. Buyers treated the demotion as a recommendation.
Why Bordeaux Grapes Work in Tuscany
The more interesting question is why Bordelais varieties took to Tuscany at all, and the answer is in the soil.
Sangiovese, Galestro, and Alberese
Chianti Classico’s great Sangiovese sites sit on two soils. Galestro is a friable, flaky clay schist that crumbles in the hand and drains hard. Alberese is a dense calcareous marl, limestone in everything but name. Both are poor, both are stony, and both force a vine to struggle, which is what Sangiovese wants. The Tignanello vineyard sits at 350 to 400 meters on calcareous rocky ground Antinori describes as alberese and marl, supporting both Sangiovese and both Cabernets.
Then you find clay, and the conversation changes.
Merlot, Clay, and the Rise of Masseto
The clearest case is Masseto, within the Ornellaia estate, on a hillside at Bolgheri. When André Tchelistcheff consulted on the founding of Ornellaia, he identified a seven-hectare parcel of blue-grey clay as ideal for Merlot and was clear that the same ground suited neither Cabernet. The main plantings went into the earth in 1984. That parcel now produces one of the most expensive Merlots on earth. It exists because somebody read the soil and planted to the soil's demands instead of planting to what was fashionable at the time.
Tchelistcheff’s name will be familiar from our piece on Parkerization and Napa, since he is the man who built the European framework out of which Napa grew. He was doing the same work on the Tuscan coast.
The pattern repeats wherever clay appears in quantity. Le Macchiole’s Messorio in Bolgheri, Tua Rita’s Redigaffi in Suvereto, Petrolo’s Galatrona in the Valdarno, Castello di Ama’s L’Apparita in Gaiole, San Giusto a Rentennano’s La Ricolma. Merlot in Tuscany is not a boardroom decision. It is a response to specific parcels of heavy ground where Sangiovese would sulk.
This logic is not Tuscan, and it turns up in places with far stricter rulebooks than Chianti’s. I wrote recently about Marpaout, Arjen Pen’s Merlot from Moulis, which is left-bank Médoc and Cabernet country by every convention. His plot sits on the third gravel terrace, but four meters down the gravel gives way to dense clay streaked with crasse de fer, the iron-rich crust more associated with Pomerol (the heartland of Merlot) than with anywhere in the Médoc. Hubert de Boüard tasted a barrel sample and wrote that the Merlot was from another planet. Nobody set out to make a left-bank Pomerol. The clay was there, and somebody dug test pits and found it.
How Climate Change Is Reshaping Tuscan Wine
There is a reason this story feels more current now than it did in 1990.
Tuscany is warming. Harvests have moved earlier, growers are planting higher, and varieties that were once a stretch on the coast now ripen with less drama. Bordeaux varieties have an advantage here that is easy to miss. They were selected in a maritime climate on gravel and clay, and the Tuscan coast is maritime, gravelly, and, in several places, clay-rich.
The same forces are at work that I covered in Parkerization and Napa Cabernet Today, where the research is clear that warming sets the range while the winemaker still picks the number inside it.
The estate this story started with makes that point itself. Carlo Paoli, increasingly hands-on at Tenuta San Guido since 2011, has steered Sassicaia away from the heavier, more extracted register of its 1990s bottlings toward freshness and length. The 2023 vintage came out of a difficult season of mildew pressure and midsummer heat spikes, finished picking on October 5, and went to bottle at 87 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 13 percent Cabernet Franc after twenty-four months in barrique. It's still at a moderate 14% alcohol by volume – retrained given the heat which only demonstrates Paoli's finesse and lighter hand. Monica Larner gave it 100 points. A warmer Tuscany did not force that wine to get bigger, instead Paoli steered it in another direction.
What climate does is widen the menu: a grower on alberese at 400 meters still has every reason to plant Sangiovese. A grower on blue clay near the sea has a legitimate argument for Merlot that has nothing to do with chasing an international palate.
How Italian Wine Law Caught Up With Super Tuscans
The law moved slower than the vineyards did, and it conceded ground a piece at a time.
Bolgheri, IGT, and Sassicaia’s Own DOC
Bolgheri got a DOC in 1983, but it covered only white and rosé. The reds, Sassicaia among them, remained table wine for another decade. The IGT category arrived in 1992, under Law 164, giving these wines a legitimate place to stand that acknowledged region without imposing a recipe. In 1994, the Bolgheri rules were rewritten to protect red blends, and a subzone called Bolgheri Sassicaia was carved out for the San Guido estate alone. At the end of 2013, that subzone became an appellation, and Sassicaia remains the only wine in Italy with a DOC to itself.
How Chianti Classico Rules Changed
Chianti moved on a similar clock. In 1996, Chianti and Chianti Classico were permitted up to 20 percent of other red varieties, Cabernet and Merlot among them. In 2006, white grapes were prohibited from Chianti Classico outright.
Every rule the Super Tuscans broke was eventually repealed. The law did not convince the producers. The producers convinced the law. Any appellation that spends a generation penalizing its most ambitious members has a design problem, and Tuscany took twenty-five years to admit that.
What Sassicaia and Tignanello Changed
The Super Tuscans are often described as Tuscany imitating Bordeaux. Fifty years on, the better reading is that a handful of producers looked at their own ground, worked out what it wanted, and accepted a legal demotion instead of planting something the soil did not support. The law called that a violation, Sassicaia and Tignanello blazed a trail to prove that law flawed.
