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Wines of Italy

Super Tuscans


The term "Super Tuscan" describes any Tuscan red wine that does not adhere to traditional blending laws for the region. For example, Chianti Classico wines are made from a blend of grapes with Sangiovese as the dominant varietal in the blend. Super Tuscans often use other grapes, especially cabernet sauvignon, making them ineligible for DOC(G) classification under the traditional rules.

In the 1970s Piero Antinori, whose family had been making wine for more than 600 years, decided to make a richer wine by eliminating the white grapes from the Chianti blend, and instead adding Bordeaux varietals (namely, cabernet sauvignon and merlot). He was inspired by a little-known (at the time) cabernet sauvignon made by relatives called Sassicaia, which openly flouted the rules set down for traditional wines in Tuscany. The result was the first Super Tuscan, which he named Tignanello, after the vineyard where the grapes were grown. Other winemakers started experimenting with Super Tuscan blends of their own shortly thereafter.

Because these wines did not conform to strict DOC(G) classifications, they were initially labeled as vino da tavola, meaning "table wine," a term ordinarily reserved for lower quality wines. The creation of the Indicazione Geografica Tipica category (technically indicating a level of quality between vino da tavola and DOCG) helped bring Super Tuscans "back into the fold" from a regulatory standpoint

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Characteristics

Important wine-relevant geographic characteristics of Italy include:
The extensive lattitudinal range of the country permits wine growing from the Alps in the north to almost within sight of Africa in the south
The fact that Italy is a peninsula with a long shoreline, contributing moderating climate to coastal wine regions
The extensive mountains and foothills providing a range of altitudes for grape growing and a variety of climate and soil conditions

Italy wine

Good and excelent wines are found in the historical wine countries as in the new ones.
Peaceful, welcoming landscapes or dramatic, rough ones, as well as venerable coltural heritages, enrich most continents.
Tasty, various, and healthy cuisines belong, instead, only to few lucky countries.
But few, gifted places offer a balance of all of that at once, and of that old fashined art of living.