Sassicaia
In the 1920s, as a student in Pisa, Mario Incisa della Rocchetta dreamed of creating a classy wine. His ideal, as for the aristocracy of the time, was Bordeaux.

This is how he describes it in a letter to Veronelli dated 6/11/1974.

...the origin of the experiment dates back to the years between 1921 and 1925, when, as a student in Pisa and often a guest of the Salviati Dukes in Migliarino, he drank a wine produced from one of their vineyards on the Vecchiano mountain that had the same unmistakable "bouquet" of an old Bordeaux that I had just tasted instead of drinking (because at 14 I was not allowed to drink wine) before 1915, at my grandfather Chigi's house.

Having settled with his wife Clarice in Tenuta San Guido on the Tyrrhenian coast, he experimented with some French vines (whose cuttings he had recovered from the estate of the Dukes Salviati in Migliarino, and not from France) and concluded that Cabernet had "the bouquet I was looking for".

No one had ever thought of producing a "Bordeaux" wine in Maremma, an area unknown from a vitivinicultural point of view.

The decision to plant this variety in Tenuta San Guido was partly due to the similarity he had noticed between this area of ??Tuscany and Graves, in Bordeaux. Graves means gravel, due to the stony soil that characterizes the area, just as Sassicaia, in Tuscany, indicates an area with the same characteristics.

From 1948 to 1967, Sassicaia remained a strictly private property and was drunk only at the Tenuta.

Every year, a few cases were left to age in the cellar in Castiglioncello.

The Marquis soon realized that the wine improved significantly with age. As often happens with great wines, what were once considered defects, over time turned into virtues.

Friends and relatives encouraged Mario Incisa to continue his experiments and perfect his revolutionary winemaking style for that area.

The 1968 vintage was the first to be launched on the market, with a reception worthy of a Bordeaux Premier Cru.

In the following years the cellar was moved to temperature-controlled rooms, steel vats replaced wooden ones for fermentation and French wine was introduced in barriques for aging.