1968–1994 · Tuscany
The Super Tuscans break the rules
Producers made better wine than the rules allowed, sold it as table wine, and eventually forced the rules to change.
What happened
From the late 1960s, a small number of Tuscan producers began making wines that ignored the DOC rules — using Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, small French barriques, and no white grapes at all.
Under the law these could only be sold as vino da tavola, the lowest category, alongside the cheapest bulk wine in Italy. They commanded prices far above the DOCG wines they were legally beneath.
The effect on the classification system was corrosive and instructive: it demonstrated in public that the legal hierarchy had come apart from quality.
The response was to change the rules. The IGT category was created in 1992 to give these wines a home, and Bolgheri received its own DOC in 1994 — an appellation created around wines that had been illegal in all but name.
It is the clearest modern illustration that appellation rules encode convention, and that convention can be wrong.
How firmly this is dated
Documented. Recorded contemporaneously. The date is not in question.
Release records and the subsequent legal history, including the creation of the Bolgheri DOC in 1994.
What this follows from, and leads to
A timeline is a list; these are the links between its entries.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Consorzio per la Tutela dei Vini Bolgheri e Bolgheri Sassicaia DOC — Consorzio Bolgheri
- Italian DOP and IGP wine register — Ministero dell’agricoltura, della sovranità alimentare e delle foreste (MASAF)
- The Oxford Companion to Wine — Oxford University Press
Along the timeline
Before · 1971
The 1971 German wine law
A law that classified German wine by grape sugar at harvest rather than by site — and took fifty years to begin correcting.
After · 1819–2010s
New Zealand: from nothing to Marlborough
A tiny, hybrid-planted industry transformed within a generation — and not only by Sauvignon Blanc.