I started writing this as a piece about Bolgheri, and ended up writing about myself, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. As in, we talk about wine, but really, we just talk about ourselves, our taste, our palate and our stories.

And this piece, the piece about Bolgheri, wasn’t even supposed to be about Bolgheri, but that doesn’t matter now. This piece is about Bolgheri and its place in the world of wine.
Its place in Italy is in Tuscany, in the northern Maremma, a land that stretches, in the words of Dante Alighieri, from Cecina to Tarquinia, now a beautiful bucolic seaside forest which was once home to Etruscan and Roman settlements, key to coin and arms metalwork, and later an abandoned malaria-riddled swamp until very recently.

Its place in the world of wine is more recent still, long after Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany started its reclamation in the early 1800s, later completed by Mussolini. I skip over thousands of years of history, which I am sure would be interesting to some, to get to when the Maremma was ultimately ready to be cropped. Grain was the chosen crop in the self-sufficiency attempt of every dictator, until the Marquis Mario Incisa della Rocchetta decided to plant Cabernet Sauvignon in 1944 on his wife’s Tenuta San Guido estate. While wine had been produced for the family since then, the 1968 vintage was the first to be released to the public under the name Sassicaia as a vino da tavola, and by the mid-1970s it was already a cult wine.

Whether the Marquis really saw the potential in the Bolgheri terroir to craft a great wine that could age, or merely wanted to make wines that he liked, not those light and pale Sangioveses (an objective I could perfectly understand), it doesn’t really matter, as one’s experiment led to a flurry of other foreigners (the Marquis himself was from Piemonte) joining in the quest. Piermario Meletti Cavallari, a former restaurateur from Bergamo, founded Grattamacco. Michele Satta arrived in Bolgheri around 1982 from Varese. Ludovico Antinori of Florence founded Tenuta dell’Ornellaia (and then Masseto) and his elder brother Piero Antinori, Tenuta Guado al Tasso. The only exception was Le Macchiole, founded by Eugenio Campolmi, a rare Bolgheri native, and his wife Cinzia Merli. Later, big names of the Italian wine world also flocked to Bolgheri — Piemonte’s Gaja (with Ca’ Marcanda) and Veneto’s Allegrini (Poggio al Tesoro).

In the decades that followed, by attracting outside capital and expertise, the physical boundaries of Bolgheri, and those of its taste, expanded. (In a similar fashion, perhaps, to what we are currently witnessing with English sparkling wine.)

I said this piece wasn’t about Bolgheri. In truth, it was meant to be about English sparkling wine, TrentoDOC, and Franciacorta. But then I found myself on a press trip in Bolgheri, visiting Argentiera, where Leonardo Raspini and his team humoured me as I questioned their very existence.

Or perhaps this piece isn’t about any of these places, and a place is just an excuse to talk about why on earth a Tuscan appellation uses international grapes. This is why I came to question its place in the world of wine—fine wine, even. Part of what I want to tell you is how a vino da tavola that uses international grape varieties came to be a place in the world of wine where its 73 producers can charge an average price three times higher than the average Italian DOC, and twice that of Barolo, Barbaresco, and Brunello di Montalcino; wines we think of as quintessentially Italian.

Restaurants’ menus are littered with generic, cheap ‘Merlot’ from Chile or ‘Sauvignon Blanc’ from Italy because at the lower end of the quality scale, people don’t really care about anything but price. Producing cheap wines with international grapes is in fact the norm.

But the opposite is true at the top end of the quality scale.

There are a lot of words to indicate a similar concept. Autochthonous. Native. Indigenous. Local. But also: quintessential, genuine, traditional, authentic, ancestral, historic, endemic, vernacular, rooted, terroir-driven, original, pure, artisanal, region-specific, emblematic, true-to-place. In this case, adjectives for grape varieties and wines made with them. But the original concept of autochthonous comes from classical Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, during the city’s imperial height. Athenians proudly claimed to be an autochthonous people, born of their own land and never having migrated elsewhere. In their mythology, autochthones were mortals who sprang from the very soil, rocks, and trees—rooted eternally to their native ground.
We are seeing a revival of autochthonous grape varieties at the moment. Italy is said to have more than 350 and some go so far as to say 700. (Perhaps this reflects Italy’s history: while many families made wine for themselves, the big push on clonal selection and quality came much more recently.) That’s to say, a renewed interest in autochthonous grape varieties means a renewed interest in Italian wines and their diversity. And in this context, I question Bolgheri’s point, that is, in the context of today’s trends.

Leonardo Raspini told me that the OIV defines an autochthonous grape variety as one that has been in a place for more than 50 years. While I couldn’t substantiate this definition, it raises a fair question — when does a grape become native? Fifty years? More? One hundred years? In the Athenians’ case, one could never become autochthonous. But in the case of Grenache, Garnacha and Cannonau it seems that seven centuries or so suffice. Does it need to be longer than the memory of the people who write about it and who drink it? That is what it is all about? Time?

Or is it about the name? Do we feel that Pinot Grigio is quintessentially more Italian, more Venetian, than, say Cabernet Sauvignon is Bolgherese? Or else, is it that the quality of the average Pinot Grigio is so low it feels divorced from Pinot Gris?

When I spoke to Nelson Pari (who, along with Federico Moccia, organises the annual Bolgheri tasting in London) about this topic, he reminded me that Italy is only 164 years old. If, after all that time, and in my own lifetime of being Italian, I still feel infinitely more Venetian than Italian, beyond any politicised separatist argument, it’s because borders are a mere construct. They can’t capture the fragmented nature of this land, nor the constant interchange of rulers, ideas, goods, and merchants that has defined the Mediterranean for millennia. We think our world is globalised. So was the Mediterranean. And while the Athenians’ idea of autochthonous is very nice and simple, and the idea of autochthonous grape varieties is very nice and simple, it denies our history and the history of wine itself. Just looking at Italy’s border regions: Trentino Alto-Adige and Fruili Venezia Giulia count a wealth of international grapes among their wines. Is Ribolla Gialla more Italian than Sauvignon? Other examples brought up by Pari: Sauvignon Blanc in Modigliana, Pinot Noir in Focara and Pinot Nero in Oltrepò Pavese, Syrah in Cortona.

Nicolò Carrara, Argentiera’s enologist, expanded on the topic of globalisation—but in reference to vineyard management and winemaking techniques. Agronomists and enologists may study in one place, but the techniques they learn are no longer purely local; knowledge about vine and wine is increasingly shared across the globe. This is even more true in Bolgheri, where collaboration and ambition seem to go hand in hand.

Returning to what makes a grape variety truly autochthonous: surely producing some of the world’s greatest wines should count as one criterion? Is there really something wrong with making exceptional wines from international grapes? And if these grapes thrive so well in a place, aren’t they, in some sense, already at home there? Or, better said in the words of Elena Pozzolini, oenologist and MD of Tenuta dei Sette Cieli: “The grape variety is the instrument, but it’s the land that gives it a voice. The soil, the microclimate, the light from the sea, the altitude, the winds — all contribute to creating a unique profile. A Cabernet grown in Bolgheri is not a Californian or Bordeaux Cabernet. I believe that a wine’s identity lies not so much in the grape variety it’s made from, but in how that grape manages to tell the story of the place it comes from. And if the result is credible, coherent, and sincere, then yes, even an international variety can become autochthonous in spirit.”

Bolgheri’s story is one of innovation and internationalisation, in a region unburdened by Tuscany’s or even Italy’s stricter traditions. Perhaps it is precisely this break from tradition that makes Bolgheri a centre for innovation and a place in constant pursuit of excellence —much like universities are (or should be) for free thought.

The question of where one grape variety, or one person, comes from seems to matter, but does it need to define one’s future? Origin is certainly important to some, grapes or people, and less so to others. And yet, as the world learns to care less about where people come from, the world of wine seems ever more obsessed with where a grape does. When I first moved to the UK, in the aftermath of the biggest economic crisis of the last century, the country was recovering faster than much of Europe and the rest of the world. Like me, many foreigners were arriving, fuelling the simmering sentiment behind UKIP’s rise. A defiant post circulating on social media at the time, aimed at responding to that sentiment, put it bluntly: “If someone who doesn’t speak the language, with no contacts or money, steals your job, then immigrants aren’t your biggest problem.”

Couldn’t something similar be said of grapes?

Jancis Robinson says every “wine-producing country should proceed in its efforts and research in finding out about its origins and traditions,” but may I add that we should also discard the parts of tradition that don’t really work — no matter how well they can be marketed?

Perhaps the point of Bolgheri, whether or not one understands or even likes its wines, is to show us — as Tom Hewson writes — that you can’t legislate wine quality, and that flows of ideas, talent, and capital (don’t ask me in which order or proportions) are as essential as grapes, earth, and sky in making excellent wine.

Photograph by Shutterstock