TENUTA DELL'ORNELLAIA

Beginning in the 1970s, there was a civil war in Tuscany. Not a revival of the Social Wars or anything similarly bloody, but a war over wine and how it was to be made. Both then and now, Chianti was the flagship and most instantly recognisable wine from the region, which brought pressure upon vignerons to make that wine and employ all of the rules that accompanied it.

Some brave souls, in the village of Bolgheri most of all, took umbrage at that, thinking they could make better wine by disregarding local convention completely, typically through the use of Bordeaux varietals. Brave, because by doing that they eschewed the option to use the Chianti label, and instead had to bottle their wines as ‘vino da tavola’ - Italy’s lowest designation.

These days those producers and their wines are known as Super Tuscans, and in some cases sell for thousands of dollars a bottle. It rather paid off then, you could say.

At the forefront of that revolution and its aftermath was Ornellaia. Using a classic Bordeaux style base of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, the Ornellaia wines are now legendary. Fortunately, too, they were also the first of the Super Tuscans to make a second wine in the La Serre Nuove dell’Ornellaia, making one of the world’s great wine estates more widely available and in more wallet-friendly reach.