CHIANTI

No one has not heard of Chianti, Italy’s most famed red wine. It’s the wine in the straw-webbed flask at Tony’s Trattoria in “Lady and the Tramp.” It’s Hannibal Lecter’s taken tipple with fava beans and liver. (Lecter’s wine, in the original book “Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris, was Amarone della Valpolicella, in cinema not very trippingly tongued.) 

Chianti has grown up with us and, like some of us perhaps, gotten better with time. Sixty years ago, though popular, it was not always well made. Today’s Chianti is as good an Italian red as can be. 

Like any good wine, it resembles the place from which it comes, one of the most comely homes for the vine, the Tuscan countryside. 

Tuscany is a unity of opposites. The castles and estates nestled throughout the Florentine and Sienese hills, often secreted within thick forests of oak and rock-rooted brush, are stout houses, formed of rough-hewn timber, earth, rock and clay. But this solidity is bathed in a soft and limpid sunlight and set against a delicate sky, the hue of robins’ eggs. 

Chianti is a similar juxtaposition of opposites. While deep in flavor and aroma, it is nonetheless refreshing and bright; while complex, always inviting. It gets that way because of its grape, the sangiovese, and the soil on which that grape thrives, outcroppings throughout Tuscany of limestone mixed with flaking shist (a banded metamorphic rock such as mica and the most carefully pronounced word in geology). 

While sangiovese is as fickle, temperamental and arrogant as its namesake (“the blood of Jove”), extraordinarily difficult both to raise in the vineyard and make into wine once harvested, there is no red wine grape like it. It fashions a rare combination of intoxicating perfume, earthy and fruity flavors both, mild-mannered but functional tannin and—most important of all its beauties—a spine of zesty acidity. 

The Tuscan hills are dotted with several “Chiantis” such as that from the region around Siena (Chianti Colli Senesi) or a personal favorite of mine, from just outside Florence to the east, Chianti Rùfina (ROO-fee-nah). The most storied region, however, is the Chianti Classico district, a large expanse south of Florence and north of Siena. 

Chianti Classico, in a formula that dates back to and has been tinkered with since the mid-1800s, is a blend of a strain of sangiovese nicknamed “sangioveto” (sangiovese piccolo) and other red grapes. These may be “international” varieties such as cabernet sauvignon, but never more than 20 percent of the blend. Today, Chianti Classico is often all-sangioveto, winemakers throwing their lot in toto behind Tuscany’s premier grape. 

I love this story about the “gallo nero” (the black rooster), the symbol of the Chianti Classico Consorzio, seen on the neck label of all its members’ wines. It tells how the original district for the Chianti Classico district was drawn by common consent of both Florence and Siena—two notoriously warring cities. 

One day, two horsemen were to ride out toward each other, one south from Florence, the other north from Siena, along the main road that links the two cities, La Chiantigiana. Where they met was to determine the southern boundary of the Classico district (the northern boundary already having been established just outside Florence). 

The black rooster of Florence, scrawny and underfed due to his tight-fisted Florentine masters, woke his rider at first light. The Sienese rooster, pampered and fat from the coddling of his luxury-loving Sienese masters, slept in. So did his rider.

Consequently, the riders met at Fonterotuli, far from Florence, the southern boundary of the Classico district now nipping at the northern suburbs of Siena. In this case, the early bird caught much more than the worm.