I should have expected it in a temple of Tuscan kitsch: Chianti in a fiasco, the bulbous bottles wrapped in straw that were a symbol of Italian eateries in 1970s Britain. Russell Norman’s brilliant new London restaurant, Brutto, is a homage to the traditional Tuscan trattoria – and as at his Venetian chain, Polpo, his attention to detail shines through in every chequered tablecloth and faux-humble typewritten menu item (“tagliatelle with meat sauce”). So as I gleefully sat down to lunch (reservations are a brag-worthy coup) I decided to order the old-fashioned Chianti.
Except there was nothing remotely old-fashioned about it. For a start, Norman told me that the producer, Alberto Antonini’s Poggiotondo estate, had to source the bottles especially for him: no serious producer has dreamt of using fiaschi in years. And despite being a straight Chianti – Poggiotondo is based well to the north of the Classico zone – this was a well-made, bright, balanced, thoroughly modern wine. In fact, the best straight Chianti I can remember drinking in years.
Nothing like the vast majority of Chianti from the fiaschi years, in other words. With local producers’ postwar pursuit of quantity over quality codified when Chianti Classico got DOC status in 1967 – still allowing the addition of white grapes to red – Chianti became a byword for astringent plonk. A few pioneers at that time started planting French grapes instead of Sangiovese to make the first Supertuscan reds. But for most, the 1970s were a period of decline, with farmers leaving the land and Chianti’s reputation seemingly unrescuable.
So which is the more authentic Chianti? Antonini’s new wine in old bottles, served up in Norman’s delightful 2022 Tuscan pastiche? Or the rubbish bulked out with workhorse Trebbiano grapes from half a century ago, created without artifice but without much care either?
The question is not facetious. The wine classification and quality-control systems of most European countries are based on principles of terroir and tradition. As the Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (as France’s INAO agency is now known) explains on its website: “Terroir is a delimited space in which a human community, over its history, builds collective production know-how, based on a system of interactions between a physical and biological environment and a set of human factors. It is here that the originality and typicity of the product lie.”
In other words, a wine’s authenticity is place plus tradition. And the strong implication is that this conjunction is immutable: a Margaux will never be a St. Emilion, and will always be typically Margaux, unmistakeable as anything else and vice versa.
Except that any place’s wines do change over time, whether at the exalted level of fine Bordeaux or that of a humble Tuscan country wine. And that can be a good thing – even when tradition fades.
Centuries of know-how in Chianti weren’t delivering much decent wine in the 1960s. And while French wine-making communities had similarly…
