Divorce appears to be on the horizon for Italy's famous Chianti wine and its upmarket version Chianti Classico, well-informed sources said. Producers of the two wines agreed on the terms of a divorce last month and the Ministry of Agriculture is expected to make it official by the end of June, according to the Wine News website.
Both wines have the DOCG recognition which ensure their geographic origins and a future divorce will settle what can be defined as Chianti and Chianti Classico. By definition, Chianti Classico can only come from a 7,000-hectare area between Florence and Siena, while the more generic Chianti can be produced there as well as in four other Tuscan provinces: Arezzo, Pisa, Pistoia and Prato.
The divorce between Chianti Classic and Chianti was facilitated by the merger last May of the two leading consortiums which produce the quality Chianti Classico wine: Vino Chianti Classico and Marchio Storico-Gallo Nero. The aim of the merger was to create a single body to better produce, promote and protect their product.
The new consortium is called Gallo Nero (Black Cock) and it oversees the production of quality registered winesin the the area between Florence and Siena. All bottles of 'real' Chianti Classico must now have the Gallo Nero trademark, which will undergo a restyling to modernised the rooster logo originally drawn in 1924, when the first consortium was founded.
The new trademark will also carry the date of 1716, the year that the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo III established Chianti's borders, in what was the first document in history to define a specific winegrowing area. The merger actually returned the situation to what it was before 1987, when for technical and legal reasons the Chianti Classico consortium was divided into two, with Marchio Storico responsible for promotion and marketing, while the other for production.
The single Chianti Classico Gallo Nero consortium counts 600 members with an annual turnover estimated at 500 million
euros and an average production of 260,000 hectoliters, equal to around 35 million bottles of wine. Chianti Classico will give a preview of its 2005 vintage February 21 and 22 at the Leopolda Station in Florence.
