Tuscany

The Chianti Classico zone — the original, historic Chianti between Florence and Siena, distinguished from the broader Chianti DOC by its black rooster (Gallo Nero) seal — covers around 7,200 hectares of vineyards on the hills of the Florentine and Sienese Apennines. The soils are a complex mosaic of galestro (friable schist), alberese (compact limestone-clay), and sandy alluvials, and the elevations range from 250 to over 600 metres. The result is a zone of extraordinary diversity within a single appellation.

The Gran Selezione category, introduced in 2014, has clarified the quality hierarchy: single-vineyard or best-barrel selections aged for a minimum of 30 months, these are the wines that make the most serious argument for Chianti Classico's place among Italy's great reds. Estates like Fontodi, Isole e Olena, Montevertine, and Fèlsina produce Gran Selezioni that can age for two decades and more — wines of real intellectual weight that reward the patience they demand.

The Classico zone is also the epicentre of a fascinating ongoing debate about Sangiovese clones. The Gallo Nero consortium has identified over 200 distinct biotypes of Sangiovese within the zone, and a growing number of producers are working with massal selections from their oldest vines rather than the certified clones that dominated replanting in the 1980s and 1990s. The wines that result — more complex, less uniform, more expressive of their specific site — are among the most exciting being made in Italy today.

Montalcino is a hilltop town south of Siena, surrounded by vineyards on all sides at elevations between 120 and 600 metres. The Brunello di Montalcino DOCG — made exclusively from Sangiovese Grosso, locally called Brunello — is Italy's most age-worthy red wine and, in its finest expressions, one of the great wines of the world. The minimum aging requirement is five years from harvest (six for Riserva), and the best examples need a decade or more in bottle before they begin to show their full complexity.

The zone divides broadly into two camps: the warmer, lower-altitude southern and eastern slopes, which produce richer, more immediately accessible wines; and the cooler, higher-altitude northern and western slopes, which give wines of greater austerity, higher acidity, and longer aging potential. Estates like Biondi-Santi — the family that effectively invented Brunello in the late nineteenth century — and Cerbaiona farm the northern slopes; Casanova di Neri and Poggio di Sotto work the south and east. Both camps produce great wine; the argument about which is 'better' is one of the pleasures of the appellation.

Rosso di Montalcino, the declassified younger sibling, is one of Italy's great wine bargains: made from the same grape on the same hillsides, aged for a minimum of one year, and typically drinking beautifully within three to five years of harvest. For visitors to the zone, it is the wine to drink with the local pici pasta and wild boar ragù — and a useful introduction to the Brunello style before committing to the longer wait.

The coastal strip of Bolgheri, south of Livorno on the Tyrrhenian coast, is where the Super Tuscan story began. Mario Incisa della Rocchetta planted Cabernet Sauvignon on his Tenuta San Guido estate in the 1940s, inspired by the great Bordeaux châteaux. For decades, Sassicaia was a private wine drunk only by the family and their friends. When it was first commercially released in 1968, it caused a sensation — and when it was included in a blind tasting against first-growth Bordeaux in 1978, it won.

Bolgheri's success spawned a generation of imitators and innovators. Ornellaia, founded in 1981 by Lodovico Antinori, added Merlot to the Cabernet blend and produced wines of even greater opulence. Masseto, the estate's single-vineyard Merlot, became one of Italy's most sought-after and expensive wines. Meanwhile, Antinori's Tignanello — a blend of Sangiovese with Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, aged in French barriques rather than the traditional large Slavonian oak — proved that the Super Tuscan approach could work with the native grape as well as the imported ones.

Today Bolgheri is a fully established appellation with its own DOC, and Sassicaia has the distinction of being the only single-estate DOC in Italy. The wines remain expensive and sought-after, but the zone has also produced a generation of smaller, more artisanal producers working at a different scale — estates like Grattamacco, Le Macchiole, and Michele Satta, whose wines offer a more intimate perspective on the same extraordinary coastal terroir.

September and October are the months that define Tuscany for wine travellers. The harvest transforms the landscape — tractors on the roads, the smell of fermenting must drifting from open cellar doors, the particular quality of autumn light on the vines as they turn from green to gold to rust. Most estates welcome visitors during harvest, and the combination of cellar activity and the season's last warm days makes it the most rewarding time to be in the region.

For Chianti Classico, the villages of Greve in Chianti, Panzano, and Radda are the natural bases — each with good restaurants, wine bars, and direct access to the estates. The Enoteca Falorni in Greve stocks wines from across the zone; the butcher Dario Cecchini in Panzano is a pilgrimage destination in its own right. For Montalcino, the town itself is small enough to walk in an hour, and the views from the fortress over the Val d'Orcia are among the finest in Tuscany. For Bolgheri, the village of Castagneto Carducci is the base, with the famous cypress-lined road to Bolgheri itself a short drive away.

The Tuscan table is the other reason to come. Bistecca alla Fiorentina — the vast T-bone from Chianina cattle, grilled over wood and served rare — is the canonical pairing for Chianti Classico Riserva. Pici cacio e pepe, ribollita, pappardelle with wild boar: the food is as rooted in the landscape as the wine, and the two together, eaten at a long table in a farmhouse courtyard as the sun goes down, are one of the great pleasures of the travelling life.