The appellation rules, enacted in , mandated a percentage of white grapes. So while Antinori hoped to elevate the image of the Chianti region, he had to do it by labeling his creation a table wine, the lowest legal denomination. In , Antinori pushed the boundaries even further, adding 15 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 5 percent Cabernet Franc to his blend to add structure and complexity. The Cabernet was grown in another Santa Cristina vineyard, called Solaia, just a few yards from Tignanello.
The super Tuscans were born. Antinori doubled down on Cabernet in Solaia produced a bumper crop that year, and Antinori bottled a new wine named for the vineyard, a blend of 95 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 5 percent Cabernet Franc. In , he began adding 20 percent Sangiovese to the blend. It made headlines in both Italy and America. Today, the super Tuscan concept has come under debate.
As producers all over Italy are making better wines with indigenous grapes, some increasingly question the use of non-native varieties. They accuse Antinori of destroying Tuscan character in his attempt to save Tuscan wine. Italy needed new ideas. In the s, Italy needed a wine that would mark it as a great wine nation.
With Tignanello, Antinori delivered exactly that. Radical change comes more easily to those with little to lose. Across the interior courtyard are administrative offices; upstairs are family apartments where Piero and his wife, Francesca, live today, along with Allegra and her young family.
The first recorded mention of the Antinoris was an document registering a land deal. When the Antinoris moved to Florence from the countryside in , the family quickly became leading traders in wool and silk. In , when brothers Giovanni da Pietro Antinori and Lodovico Antinori wanted to expand operations, their mother, Albiera, suggested the wine trade.
Antinori is a scholar of his family history. He has written several books, and the library on the third floor holds endless tomes listing centuries of business transactions—when the family bought this or that piece of land and how much wool it produced each year.
He also takes pride in how the wine business endured through the centuries. He began working in sales right after returning from fighting in World War I, then bought out his uncles a decade later. In Italy, everyone drank Italian wine. Italian wine had history, but it had a dreadful reputation. In , he created Villa Antinori, with a picture of a family estate near Florence on the label. The bottle was not a fiasco , but a Bordeaux-style bottle.
He even planted some Cabernet vines at Santa Cristina in My father also took public positions. He was patriotic and wanted to help in the reconstruction of Italy. I was able to devote my whole life to the company. Antinori was with his father when war directly scarred the business. In July of , the father and son were at Santa Cristina when word came that the retreating German army had passed through San Casciano and ransacked the Antinori cellars. I had taken my son Piero with me, and for him it was his first experience of work.
In family businesses, the biggest danger almost always comes from within the family. Each of the siblings owned a third of Antinori. Ilaria had never been interested in the business. Lodovico, five years younger than his brother, was 23 when Piero took over management. The brothers have more recently partnered on a winery, Tenuta di Biserno, outside Bolgheri. In , Lodovico was working on his own wine project. But he needed cash to get it started. Antinori did not have the money to buy them out.
More importantly, he had invested millions in updating the cellars and replanting vineyards. But he did have an offer from someone who could help. Whitbread was a U. The managers were looking to get into wine production. Antinori knew a deal with Whitbread could buy out his siblings. He also hoped a partnership with the company importing his wines to his most important foreign market would improve business there.
And there was one other reason for a deal—Antinori believed he had no potential successor. He has three daughters and no sons. And though he admits now that his thinking looks antiquated, at the time he did not think his daughters would want to join the business.
He regretted it almost immediately. His new partners, executives of a publicly traded corporation, had different priorities than he did.
Whitbread executives resisted the move because the vineyards needed new investments that would take almost a decade to show results. Antinori bought it anyway. Two years later, another prime Chianti Classico estate, Badia a Passignano, came up for sale. Again Whitbread fought the purchase. The analysts look at the quarterly results. Her sisters would soon follow. In , Antinori reached out to a friend at a large bank about obtaining financing to buy out his partners. Rumor was that Whitbread had grown tired of the wine business—it was shopping its spirits division to corporate giant Allied Lyons later Allied Domecq.
And that company wanted control of Antinori as part of the deal. Whitbread was already preparing to buy out Antinori. It would take a huge amount of money to stop them. Antinori was not about to surrender. He sold his share of a successful financial business to raise cash. And he asked Maranghi for a loan, with his personal net worth and Palazzo Antinori as collateral. By the end of the year, Marchesi Antinori Wines was percent family-owned again.
At age 53, Antinori had the full weight of the company back on his shoulders and was saddled with huge financial obligations. It was a gamble. The fresh start allowed him to initiate a plan to change the focus of the company.
The hills of Chianti Classico are sleepy, but they appear downright cosmopolitan compared with the country surrounding Castello della Sala, an imposing stone edifice in the midst of old trees, vineyards and precipitous cliffs of white volcanic stone called tufo. The lights of Orvieto twinkle in the distance. Cotarella comes here almost every weekend, reconnecting with his own family terroir. He grew up not far away in a small village where his father grew grapes and where Cotarella and his older brother, Riccardo, a highly successful consulting enologist, still share a house.
In , Cotarella was attending winemaking school nearby when some professors recommended him for the part-time job of staff enologist for the local wine consortium.
Antinori, as owner of della Sala, was serving as consortium president at that time. In , Antinori poached Cotarella, then 24, to serve as winemaker at della Sala. By that time, Antinori had grabbed attention with Tignanello and Solaia. He decided it was time to try the Tignanello model at another estate and that Cotarella was the man to help him. It was an ideal, if daunting, job for a young enologist. Cotarella was suddenly managing a large property, much of which needed replanting, and experimenting in the cellar, with advice from Tachis.
Antinori and his young winemaker bounced ideas off each other as Cotarella tried different grapes, planting densities and winemaking techniques.
They fermented in steel tanks and oak barrels; they cold-soaked Chardonnay juice on the skins. In the end, they created several new wines; their flagship was a blend of Chardonnay and local grape Grechetto called Cervaro della Sala. When Antinori and Tachis had been creating Tignanello, they had also expanded the San Casciano cellars, increasing production from 75, cases a year to more than , The company also moved outside Tuscany, buying Prunotto in Piedmont, founding Tormaresca in Puglia and starting a joint venture for sparkling wines in Franciacorta called Montenisa.
There have been additional joint ventures in Malta, Hungary and Chile. The Santa Cristina brand is made at a large winery outside the Tuscan hill town of Cortona. More than 80 percent of the grapes are grown by Antinori; the goal is to increase that to percent. As for Villa Antinori, its wines are blends from multiple Antinori estates.
Today, Antinori owns more than 5, acres of vines. It sold more than 1. Cotarella believes that the next decade for the company will be about finding the voice of each estate. He admits that doing so has been a process of trial and error and that there is still much to learn.
But since Antinori regained complete ownership, he has constantly preached patience and persistence. When Tachis retired in , becoming a consulting enologist, Antinori knew that Cotarella was the man to oversee winemaking for the entire company. The job description has evolved too. From a distance, the new facility looks like a typical Tuscan vineyard, except for two brown horizontal slashes across the hill.
Move closer, and you can see that the winery, officially named Antinori of Chianti Classico, is buried underground—the slashes are terraces and windowed offices looking out. Guests drive into an underground garage, then climb a corkscrew staircase to a visitors center.
It replaces the old San Casciano cellars, which had grown crowded and outdated. Allegra Antinori is leading guests deep inside the hill, to the cellars, immense vaulted rooms filled with tanks and barrels.
The walls are clad in Tuscan terra-cotta. We need to put some soul into the winery. None of this has been easy. Cotarella teases that the winery construction, which he and Albiera oversaw, was tougher on the marchese than on them. Antinori chuckles when this comment is relayed to him, but he has faced a lot of challenging financial decisions since buying back the company.
Now the company is in a very healthy situation. What has allowed him to do it all is that the company has prospered and the family is completely invested in it. All profits have been invested in the company. A few years ago, Antinori gave his daughters a reading assignment. The book has its salacious details, but it is a cautionary tale of a family winery that grew, went public and then got into trouble as siblings squabbled and shareholders demanded returns.
A company like ours needs to have a soul. You need to keep it, not sell it to Wall Street. Each of the daughters took the lesson to heart. They believe that for Antinori Wines to continue to succeed, it needs to keep the values of their family.
Antinori says you cannot push children to join you in your business. That said, he always made sure to give his daughters every opportunity to find their way in. Allegra says some of her favorite memories are of accompanying her father to vineyards, which she began doing at age 8. An occasion in which there are those who treat themselves to the trip of a lifetime, those who treat themselves to an unforgettable dinner, those who treat themselves to a jewel or perhaps a dream wine.
That is, the hill of Tignanello, where one of the most important estates of Marchesi Antinori is located with hectares of vineyards and a villa that dates back to the 16th century.
From here was born in addition to the famous Solaia and Marchese Antinori Chianti Classico Riserva , as mentioned and as the name itself tells, Tignanello, one of the most important wines of the Italian panorama.
Tignanello which today is one of the most famous Italian labels and coveted by collectors around the world, among the top brands according to the Liv-Ex fine wine index and among the 15 most sought after wines according to Wine-Searcher.
And, in its own way, an Italian milestone. Produced in blend with Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, it was the first Sangiovese to be aged in barriques, the first modern red wine blended with non-traditional varieties of the territory such as Cabernet , and among the first red wines in Chianti Classico not to use white grapes.
A historic wine, produced only in the best vintages, particularly dear to Piero Antinori, perhaps the most esteemed of Italian producers - today honorary president, but active and present in Marchesi Antinori, led by his daughter Albiera, with his sisters Allegra and Alessia, and with the managing director Renzo Cotarella, perhaps, will have toasted to this important purchase, and to 50 years of Tignanello, uncorking the historic , the one of the debut, or , the first in which the Sangiovese was added to the Cabernet, or , the one of 30 years, or even the more recent , awarded by Italian and international critics, and n.
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