Tenuta San Guido

Sassicaia, once called Italy’s greatest red wine by the eminent English author Hugh Johnson, was the harbinger of the modern vogue for Cabernet Sauvignon in Tuscany. Considered the original Super-Tuscan, and ranking for decades as the nation’s most illustrious vino da tavola, Sassicaia became, in 1994, Italy’s first wine from a single property to be awarded a DOC with a special zone of its own under the Bolgheri appellation. The Sassicaia story began half a century earlier, when Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, a native of Piedmont, planted cuttings of Cabernt vines from Bordeaux’s Chateau Lafite at his San Guido estate. That area, the Marmma, on the coast of Tuscany, was not considered suited to quality vines, and for years Mario Incisa made a little wine for family and friends while concentrating on his main occupation of raising thoroughbred racehorses. Eventually, though, word of Sassicaia’s undeniable signs of class spread, and from the 1968 vintage Incisa’s nephew, Pieto Antinori, of the prominent Florentine house, talked him into selling 3,000 bottles. Antinori winemaker Giacomo Tachis, assisted by the eminent Bordeaux enologist Emile Peynaud, gave Sassicaia a style that influenced a generation of Italian winemakers. The wine became a legend after a tasting sponsored by Decanter magazine in London in 1978 in which is triumphed over 34 select Cabernets from around the world. Since Mario Incisa’s death in 1983, the estate has been run by his son Nicolo, who has sagely expanded vineyard and built production to about 150,000 bottles annually. In keeping with the dignified estate image inspired by Bordeaux, the Incisa della Rocchetta family insists on making only one wine exclusively from its own vineyards. Sassicaia, in great demand around the world, recently fetched $5,175 for six bottles of the 1985 vintage at a Christie’s auction in New York. Some of its most ardent admirers in the North America refer to the wine simply as “Sass”.