Falstaff Magazin International 00/2021

wine / SUPERTUSCANS San

wine / SUPERTUSCANS San Felice in Chianti Classico’s south: a wonderful Borgo with wine estate, hotel and fine dining restaurant. Vignorello di San Felice is the forefather of all Supertuscans – this is where it all started. It was the British Master of Wine Nicolas Belfrage who first coined the term in the mid-1980s. He dubbed the range of new wines that had emerged in Tuscany in the preceding years as Supertuscans. Until then, Italian wine had steadily gone downhill. Its most famous proponent was Chianti Classico – deep in crisis and marketed at ridiculously low prices. At the time, Italy was not considered a country of fine wine. Where red wine was concerned, France, with Bordeaux and Burgundy, towered over everything; apart from that there were perhaps a handful of exotic wines that had some standing. CHANGING TRADITIONS At that time, production regulations for Chianti Classico still stipulated that white grapes like Trebbiano or Malvasia Bianca had to form part of the blend alongside the traditional red varieties Sangiovese, Canaiolo and Colorino. For the steadily Photos: Bruno Bruchi Photo, Martino Balestreri, Maurizio Gjivovich , Andrea Getuli , 20 falstaff summer 2021

AT THE TIME, SANGIOVESE WAS CONSIDERED TOO WEAK TO MAKE GOOD WINE ON ITS OWN, MERLOT AND CABERNET WERE SUPPOSED TO REMEDY THAT. YET SOME STILL FIRMLY BELIEVED IN TUSCANY’S INDIGENOUS VARIETY. growing number of winegrowers who wanted to show that great, long-lived red wines could be produced in Tuscany, this antiquated regulation which prized quantity over quality was an insurmountable obstacle. Thus, the idea was born to produce a wine solely from red grapes. Enzo Morganti, oenologist and director of the San Felice winery in southern Chianti Classico, took the first step: from the 1968 vintage onwards, he produced a wine only from Sangiovese, which he called Vigorello. Initially, however, the wine world took little notice. This changed abruptly three years later. The Marchesi Antinori, then as now one of the leading brands of Italian wine, presented their Tignanello in 1971 – made entirely without white grapes and in this first vintage exclusively from Sangiovese. It was not until the next vintage, 1974, that Cabernet Sauvignon was added. Because the wine did not comply with existing regulations, it was not allowed to be labelled Chianti Classico: the mandatory white varieties were missing. The solution was easy: Tignanello was simply declared as vino da tavola, as a table wine, because in this category everything was allowed. There were over 130,000 bottles of the first vintage, and they sold like hot cakes - even though the price for Tignanello was five times that of a Chianti Classico Riserva. In the mid-1970s, Antinori also took over the distribution of Sassicaia, produced by Incisa della Rocchetta in Bolgheri, which was still completely unknown at the time: a red wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, without any Sangiovese at all – an absolute novelty for Tuscany. AN IDEA TAKES FLIGHT At the end of the 1960s, Sergio Manetti, a successful industrialist from Milan, bought an abandoned farmhouse near Radda which he converted into a holiday home. < Martino Manetti continues making wine in the same clear vein as his father Sergio at Montevertine Estate. summer 2021 falstaff 21