Giuseppina Strepponi, Verdi’s devout lifetime companion and muse had sacrificed her own career at the peak of her success as a soprano for the genius of Busseto. In a few lines written to a friend, she revealed an unusual and unexpected side of her famous companion’s character. That great man whom historians described as a guff and withdrawn personality, showed other more sensitive aspects of his character in his private life.
“Verdi – she wrote – is well, has good appetite, runs around the garden, sleeps and drinks Chianti, nothing but Chianti. Long live Chianti and those who succeed in obtaining such a good one.”
Now, it is well known that Verdi ate and drank with gusto. It is more difficult to imagine the sanguigne and proud creator of Othello and La Traviata running lightheartedly, much like a child, on his lawn. However, as we do not want to deny that tender observation it is natural to suppose that the newly found desire to…frolic was aroused by a few extra glasses of Chianti which Verdi preferred to any other wine. Verdi, who was born in the area of the Lambruschi and the Trebbiani.
This was Verdi. But how many great men probably favored the nectar of these vines? Michelangelo is another artist who loved wine. Indeed, he seems to have been the owner of a ‘Casa da Oste’, which in those times meant a rustic villa. A letter to his nephew Lionardo, written on the 19th of April 1549, testifies his firm intention to purchase a house in this area. The artist writes: “I prefer to buy that farm in the Chianti rather than keep the money”. That farm is probably the present one called Nittardi, situated in the countryside of Castellina. It is a small wine producing farm and has been one of the most popular in the area for some time. Michelangelo, who was by then getting on his age, seems to have gone to this property to personally control the harvest and produce wine which he obviously sustained as being the best in the Chianti. He made precious gifts of his wine to the Pope or Popes, seeing that there had been at least four Popes in the last fourteen years of his life. After hm, many famous men have had dealings with the Chianti. This time we can rely on a vast documentation. A faithful student and and friend of Galileo Galilei, Vincenzo Viviani, informs us that the scientist who shook the ancient, obtuse astronomical certainties, and paid dearly for it, owned a farm near Grignano. As a wine grower he also seems to have given vent to his natural thirst for knowledge, trying out new grafts and personal innovations.
However, Galileo was also a poet, one of those rare men able to grasp the strength of an emotion and express it in words. As a poet, he probably wrote the most touching lines dedicated to wine: “Wine is the blood of the Earth, the sun captured and transformed by such an artificial structure as the grape, a wonderful laboratory, where machinery, intelligence, and energy are put together by a perfect magician-sorcerer and the wine is transformed into a masterly compound of sap and light, thanks which human inventiveness emerges distinctly and clearly, the soul expands, the spirit is comforted, and hilarity reigns supreme“. It is the concept of a scientist and a man of faith who feels the presence of God “the perfect magician-sorcerer” who has planned everything in nature; a God who can be found in everything that exists, and hence also in that “wonderful laboratory” that is, the grape which gives birth to wine.

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See also:

Adjectives to Describe Chianti Wine, Pure Chianti Classico, Chianti Classico Wine in Short, A ‘Saint’ Wine of Tuscany – Vinsanto, History of The Fiasco

or go back to An Introduction to Chianti Wine