What's the point of Bolgheri?

A philosophical piece on Tim Atkin

For once, I’ve written a philosophical piece — about Bolgheri and its place in the world of wine. I spent a few days at Argentiera in Tuscany, where Leonardo Raspini (MD of Argentiera) and the team kindly humoured my questions.

Why does it matter? I’ve written about Bolgheri before — One for the Cellar, A Tuscan Estate to Watch — but this time I wanted to take the long view on a Tuscan appellation built on international grape varieties, at a moment when the wine world seems more interested than ever in autochthonous grapes.

I can’t predict the future — no one can — but this is my take on Bolgheri. (Don’t worry, a numbers piece is coming next.)

Read this piece on timatkin.com

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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).