Vineyards in Tuscany.
The analogy isn’t exact (they rarely are), but Tuscany’s offer, too, was once… well, more monotonous than monolithic. I remember the straw-bottomed fiaschi (flasks) of Chianti from my early drinking days in the 1970s, and the light, dreary wine they tended to contain: uninspired, often careless blends of Sangiovese with other local varieties, red and white. There was, of course, aristocratic Montalcino, based on pure Sangiovese and the high-quality Brunello clone, but (as with Bordeaux’s elite today) it was a tiny head sitting atop Tuscany’s vast and unshapely body.
The arrival of new varieties (ironically, from Bordeaux) and the celebrated ‘SuperTuscan’ wines they spawned changed everything, together with the discovery that the formerly derided, mosquito-infested Maremma coastal region actually harboured great terroir for these incomers: Sassicaia and Bolgheri. Squabbles continue about the wisdom of allowing these varieties into the DOCG regulations for Chianti Classico, but let’s stick to the bigger picture: their arrival here was creatively explosive. Cabernet and Merlot (even today, only 6% and 8% of plantings in Tuscany) jolted imagination and excitement into Tuscan wine creation from the 1970s onwards; Sangiovese-based wines, indeed, vastly improved, either in blends or by example. All of this has been worth billions of euros to Tuscan wine producers – and brought huge drinking pleasure to wine lovers around the world.
I was thinking about all this when, returning from Italy to France in late June, I dropped in on the Moretti Cuseri family’s Tenuta Sette Ponti estate in Valdarno. The
