How the Ricasolis took back Chiantishire

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Francesco Ricasoli’s story is extraordinary, and not just in the context of the Chianti Classico heartland of Tuscany in which he operates. His family were nobles in the court of Charlemagne and owned so much land between Siena and Florence that at one time they were barred from public office because they were deemed insufficiently impartial. The ban didn’t last. In the 19th century, Bettino Ricasoli became the newly formed Italy’s second prime minister. He also famously (among us winos) drew up the rules for producing Chianti.

The family’s seat, the Castello di Brolio, high above the village of Gaiole, was built in the 12th century but razed in 1478 by the Aragonese. On its hilltop is now a crenellated red-brick 19th-century reconstruction of a medieval castle with so many rooms that Ricasoli says he has never bothered to count them. It’s open to the public and used for only the most exclusive events, such as his daughter Sofia’s wedding (from which he was still recovering during my visit there last month).

But even more extraordinary is what happened to all this heritage in the 1970s and 1980s. The family, who were under financial strain, sold the Ricasoli brand to Canadian drinks giant Seagram. I and others watched with horror as its reputation shrivelled, a process that showed every sign of continuing under the subsequent owners, the Australian producer Hardys. Brolio Chianti Classico became a discounted supermarket staple.

In 1993, Francesco Ricasoli, at the time a photographer shooting ads for the likes of Valentino and Ray-Ban, decided enough was enough. He managed to buy back the beleaguered brand, encouraged by Lapo Mazzei, the prominent head of Fonterutoli, another famous Chianti Classico estate about half an hour away in Castellina in Chianti.

“You could see the sky through the roof of the winery. It all had to be rebuilt,” says Ricasoli, who quickly began to renovate the vineyards. “I’d bought back a huge basket of risk.”

Nowadays the reputation of Brolio has been restored. In conjunction with local scientists, Ricasoli has not just been looking into plant quality (prioritising Tuscany’s indigenous Sangiovese over the Bordeaux varieties that were once popular in the region), but also the estate’s 19 soil types, cork quality, and even the precise relationship between oxygen and sulphites. He has already started replacing the vines he planted in the 1990s with improved clones that his research has identified. Another project with the University of Pisa aims to create a scientifically determined aromatic profile for each wine.

His pride and joy are his distinctly different single-vineyard Chianti Classicos, which are priced even above Castello di Brolio, his classic offering in the top Chianti Classico category known as Gran Selezione. Single-vineyard Chianti Classico is now a major trend throughout the area. According to Ricasoli, “It’s like having a different angle on the region without changing the components.”

Ricasoli was born and brought up in the Castello and clearly has a deep love of every one of the estate’s 1,200 hectares. When driving me round between rain showers — 2023 brought Tuscany’s wettest spring and early summer in living memory — he would stop and marvel at the views. “Look! There’s Siena,” he’d nod approvingly at the horizon.

Ever since the buyback, Lapo Mazzei’s son Filippo has been chief executive of both Brolio and Fonterutoli, sharing the latter role with his brother Francesco Mazzei. To an outsider, this looks like a strange arrangement but Ricasoli explains it thus: “I knew very little (almost nothing) about vineyards and the wine business and asked Filippo to help me. We have known each other since childhood and trust between us has never been in discussion. The proof is that after more than 30 years, our friendship and trust has not failed! Nowadays I am still involved in daily decisions and operations, and Filippo is next to me for whatever important decision has to be taken.”

It is not normal business practice for rival companies to be run by the same person, but then these Tuscan estates are not normal businesses. If Ricasoli can trace his family’s involvement with wine back to 1141, the Mazzeis of Fonterutoli can claim that it was their ancestor Ser Lapo Mazzei who, in 1398, first documented a wine called Chianti in correspondence with a merchant in Prato. Perhaps such historic genealogies make modern commercial rivalries seem rather inconsequential. The important thing for both the Ricasolis and Mazzeis is presumably to continue the family tradition by making better and better wine in order to stay in the game. (And not to sell any part of the business to foreigners.) Ricasoli insists he has never taken a lira out of the business.

The Mazzeis, two brothers and two cousins of the next generation, aren’t sitting on their laurels either. They keep adding new vineyards and now have 117 hectares of vines in seven very different locations in three of the 11 Chianti Classico districts that are, for the first time, permitted on wine labels from the 2020 vintage. Part of the rationale for such disparate expansion by Fonterutoli is to spread the risk of hail, which is becoming increasingly common in Chiantishire.

As Filippo and Francesco Mazzei, along with Filippo’s son Giovanni, gave me a tour of the vineyards closest to the smart winery designed by their architect sister, we bumped into Howard, the gamekeeper from Devon. “Hallo, Marchesi,” he yelled cheerily. (All of the wine producers mentioned here have titles.) Our route had taken us through the little town of Castellina past an ugly animal-feed plant. “It’s there to remind us how beautiful the rest of Chianti Classico is,” said Giovanni, who is responsible for their new 100 per cent Sangiovese wine Ipsus, which has its very own winery and an eye-watering price tag of well over £200 a bottle.

The wine producers of Chianti Classico are on a roll. At the end of the last century, many of them felt inferior to the wave of new producers in Bolgheri on the Tuscan coast as the vogue then was for Bolgheri’s super-ripe reds based on Bordeaux grapes Cabernet and Merlot.

But in hotter times, Chianti Classico producers can scorn the heat of the Tuscan coast and treasure their much higher altitude and cooler climate. And there is now newfound respect for Sangiovese, the hallmark grape of Chianti Classico, partly thanks to research into superior Sangiovese plants and partly because of a worldwide wave of enthusiasm for indigenous rather than imported grape varieties. From 2027, the minimum proportion of Sangiovese in any Chianti Classico is to be raised from 80 to 90 per cent. (It used to be much lower.)

Producers’ top wines used to be the so-called Supertuscans, wines containing a high proportion of French grapes. But now, an all-Tuscan heritage is something to be proud of, as Francesco Ricasoli and the Mazzeis can attest.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Some international stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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