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Chianti, the land of Bacchus
According to a recent survey, the dream of
many English people and Americans is to own a house in Chianti, that part of
Tuscany which lies between Florence and Siena, and which is characterised by
gentle hills covered with woods, vineyards and olive groves, and rows of
cypresses, on the slopes of which stand castles, farmhouses, and medieval
villages, creating an enchanting landscape magically emerging from the mists of
a past that seems to still exist there.
Some
have succeeded in turning their dream into reality. However, most of them have
to content themselves with passing a few days a year in one of the many
beautiful stone farmhouses which have been turned into ‘agriturismo’. The
peasants, as was already mentioned in the introduction, abandoned these houses
in the 1950s when it no longer paid to
farm this region and it became too difficult to continue to live here.
03 - Chianti, the land of Bacchus
Now a day is extremely difficult to find a
country stone house for sale, and those few remaining are extremely expensive.
In the sixties and seventies of the previous century, the whole world raced to
grab a piece of Chianti. Fortunately the new owners have, with love, good taste
and patience, saved this spectacular architectural heritage from total
destruction, giving new life to farmhouses, villas, castles and the agriculture
linked to them. It is thanks to this fresh input of energy and capital that
this part of Tuscany is today experiencing a new Renaissance, based on a strong
tourist demand and on its traditional products, wine and olive oil, the
production of which at the same time defines and models the landscape and the
rhythms of Chianti.
Spectacular above all in October, when the vintage, or the grape
harvest, is finished, and the leaves of the vines, change in a matter of days,
from green to yellow to orange.
In
the last fifteen years, thanks to the enormous interest its new owners have
taken in Chianti and its agriculture, and above all thanks to the intelligence
and the intuition of the traditional winemakers like the Antinori, the
Frescobaldi, and the Ricasoli, ancient noble Florentine families who have
always produced wine, in the region there has been a race to plant to new
vineyards. Moreover, with the introduction to Chianti of new qualities of grape
previously unknown here in Tuscany - the reds, Cabernet, Merlot, ...
... and Pinot
nero, and the whites, Chardonnay, Sauvignon and Pinot grigio - a number of
other excellent wines have now taken their place beside the traditional
Chianti. From Chianti’s original formula, written down halfway through the
nineteenth century, after much experimentation, by Baron Ricasoli, owner of the
castle of Brolio, the white grapes, Malvasia and Trebbiano, have been
eliminated, resulting in a full-bodied red that improves with age, composed
mostly of the black grape Sangiovese with the addition in varying quantities of
Merlot and Cabernet.
Throughout Chianti there are many public wine-tasting events that allow
the visitor not only to try the various wines, but also to explore the world
which produces them, for example, by visiting the farms. The most famous of
these events is without a doubt the one which takes place in Greve, the most
important town in Chianti, in the second week of September. This period
coincides with the beginning of the vintage, well worth observing, perhaps by
planning your holidays in some ‘agriturismo’ towards the end of September.
Even
if machinery has taken the place of the feet of the boys and girls who, with
their skirts tucked up, intoxicated by the vapours of the must, their legs wound around each other, for hours
and hours crushed the grapes in the vats, performing a kind of dance, a kind of
sensual, almost erotic, bacchanalia, the vintage remains the key event of this
land so beloved by Bacchus.
Not
long after, in November, it is time to pick the olives: the fields teem with
people, who, armed with long ladders and rubber pincers, comb branch after
branch, thus knocking the olives off into the nets or into old parachutes
spread on the ground under every tree.
When the olives undergo the cold pressing
absolutely necessary to preserve intact the organoleptic characteristics of the
oil, it is labelled “extra virgin oil”, more expensive than the normal
commercial oils, but beyond a doubt a genuine medicine for its numerous
health-giving properties: the most important perhaps being that of lowering the
amount of cholesterol in one’s blood. Olive oil has without a doubt been the
basis, from the time of the ancient Greeks, for the flowering of all those
civilisations in the Mediterranean basin that found in it the vital sap for
their nourishment. Tuscany is the furthest north that the olive tree grows, because
being an evergreen it is always active and thus risks freezing when the
temperature in winter drops below zero, as happened in January 1985 when for
two weeks Tuscany found itself exceptionally exposed to freezing aircurrents
from Siberia that forced the temperature to drop to around -20°C for about a
fortnight. It was a catastrophe: almost
all the trees died because of the increased volume of the water-filled sap, and
only today are the new trees, born from the trunks of the olives which had to
be chopped down, beginning to produce a satisfying quantity of oil.
