Tuscany

The Etruscans were making wine in these hills seven centuries before Christ, and doing it well enough to export north into Gaul — Etruscan amphorae have been dug up across France. Rome inherited the vineyards and the trade; the monasteries and the medieval city-states inherited them from Rome. By the Middle Ages, Florentine merchants were selling Tuscan wine across Europe and forming guilds to protect it.

In 1716 the Grand Duke of Tuscany did something extraordinary: he issued an edict legally defining the boundaries of Chianti and three other wine zones, and set up a body to police them. It is among the first appellation systems anywhere in the world — nearly two hundred years before France formalised its own. The black rooster that still marks the zone comes from a medieval legend about how Florence and Siena settled their border with a horse race at cockcrow.

The modern chapters are more recent than most guests expect. Brunello was essentially invented in the late nineteenth century by one estate that decided to bottle Sangiovese alone and age it for years — a heresy at the time. Then in the 1970s a handful of producers near the coast planted French varieties and ignored the rulebook entirely; the law forced them to label the results as ordinary table wine. Those 'table wines' became the Super Tuscans, and within a decade the rules had been rewritten around them.