Ian D'Agata on Chianti, Carmignano and Montepulciano

The good news for wine lovers everywhere is that after a spell of real trouble—a period during which many downright faulty or nondescript and overpriced wines were made, and consumer interest, even in Italy, slumped—these wines are now starting to make a real comeback. And it should be so, as at their best they are fruit-driven wines with firm acidity and good tannic backbone, capable of aging gracefully and developing extremely complex bouquets and flavors. In fact, when grown in this neck of the Italian woods—cooler climate, higher altitudes, long growing season—the late-ripening, high-acid sangiovese can deliver wines that are every Eurocentric wine lover’s objective, wines in which balance and refinement are everything. Even more important, in an age in which high stress and fast-paced lifestyles are changing our eating habits, these fragrant, juicy wines, with their aromas and flavors of sour cherry and tart berries, their low alcohol and their medium body, are ideal partners at the lunch or dinner table.

In the past, this part of Italy has seemed bent on repeatedly shooting itself in the foot. First, in the 1970s, there was too much insistence on the presence of white grape varieties (at least in Chianti), one of which was never even a part of the original Chianti blend. Baron Ricasoli, the inventor of the original Chianti “recipe,” had never intended to include the lowly trebbiano toscano—the ugni blanc the French know better than to use to make quality table wine (in fact, they distill it and use it to make Cognac!). Consider also that much of the sangiovese planted then wasn’t even the Tuscan sub-variety, but often the less noble kind typical of Emilia Romagna.

Then the 1980s brought a wave of wines that were topheavy with cabernet sauvignon and merlot—wines in which nobody but the most optimistic of us had any chance of discerning any sangiovese character. Time and again, the more delicate sangiovese personality was sacrificed by producers looking to make brooding wines with greater international appeal. This so-called modernization of Tuscan red wine was exacerbated by a slew of arrivals of new, moneyed owners who had little, if any, winemaking experience but who wished to own a part of this enchanted corner of Italy. You can easily understand why these wines, more than others, became the hunting grounds of ubiquitous consulting enologists, who often worked for many estates a stone’s throw away from one another and who couldn’t really be blamed for applying their tried-and-true winemaking recipes everywhere they went. After all, they were being asked to make wines that would instantly do well in the market: no sense bothering with the finer aspects of little-studied Italian native varieties or subtle differences in terroir.