The documented history of Chianti has been recorded for many centuries, whereas the ‘unofficial’ one began, we can say, at the origin of life on the planet, as fossils of vitis vinifera, several millions years old, have been traced in Tuscany. We also know that the Etruscans and the Romans drank wine and that after the fall of the most glorious Empire of all times, during the dark ages of the Barbarians, the age of destruction and chaos, the monks took refuge in their impregnable abbeys with the impelling desire to save the memory of the longest and most prolific period of civilization from the obscurity of violence.
They started to write down everything they knew, with the patience, the accuracy and the humble skillfulness of those who are not seduced by the bad advice of haste as they had a very personal concept of time in their lives. Furthermore, they also wrote about how the lands and the vines had been cultivated until then. This was also recorded in accurately documented texts by the monks of Badia a Coltibuono and Badia a Passignano, texts which certainly contributed to the diffusion of viticulture in this area.
The actual history began in 913. A parchment, found in church of Santa Maria a Lucignano, describes the practice of wine making in the Chianti. From then on, there is a continuous increase of evidence. The Guild of vintners was established in the second half of the 13th century and it is well known that in Florence, Siena and other cities, inns and wine cellars were opened where people could drink and make merry. The wines were red and sparking. There was not yet mention of Chianti. It was necessary to wait until a commercial contract was signed in 1398 by Ser Lapo Mazzei, a literary man, jurist and scholar of economics in the service of the Florentine Signoria. Ser Mazzei authorizes the payment for “6 barrels…of white Chianti wine”. Here comes the surprise. In those times, the word Chianti meant a white wine produced in the territory of the present Sienese Chianti. In the present-day Florentine Chianti, which was not yet included in the area, red wines were produced. Some of the most popular were those of Valdigreve, Vignamaggio, Montefioralle and Uzzano. In his commentary to the Divine Comedy in 1481, Landino says that “the valley of the Chianti produces excellent wine”. It is nevertheless difficult to establish when the Chianti changed its color and was identified as a red wine. At the beginning of the 18h century, in the times of Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici, Chianti wine had already become very famous, to the point that they decided to establish the geographic boundaries
of the area of production which has remained the same as that of today, except for a few slight differences. A ministerial decree of 1932 went further by differentiating the Chianti wine produced in the territory of the same name from the Chianti wine produced in the other areas of the Florentine province, thus stressing the special qualities of the former.