Sangiovese

Sangiovese is Italy's most planted variety and the grape of Tuscany, and it is unusually sensitive to site and to clone — two Sangiovese wines from twenty kilometres apart can bear very little resemblance to each other.

The constant is the structure: high acidity, firm and often dusty tannin, medium body and a colour that is rarely deep. The flavours run to sour cherry, red plum and dried tomato, with dried herbs, leather, tobacco and a characteristic savoury, faintly bitter finish. It is a wine built around food rather than around fruit.

Chianti Classico, in the hills between Florence and Siena, is the reference. Montalcino, further south, warmer and drier, produces Brunello — a hundred per cent Sangiovese from a local clone, aged for years and among Italy's longest-lived reds. Montepulciano makes Vino Nobile from the Prugnolo Gentile clone. In the Maremma on the coast it is Morellino, softer and fruitier. On Corsica it is Nielluccio.

The modern history is instructive. Chianti's rules once required white grapes in the blend, a legacy of an 1872 recipe, which produced thin wine and drove ambitious producers outside the appellation entirely. The Super Tuscans of the 1970s — Bordeaux varieties, or Sangiovese blended with them, sold as humble table wine — forced a reform that arrived in stages through the 1990s.

It is a genetic parent of a long list of Italian varieties including Frappato, and its own parentage involves Ciliegiolo and an obscure southern Italian grape.

Clonal variation matters more for Sangiovese than for almost any other grape. The high-yielding clones planted widely in the 1960s and 1970s produced thin, pale wine and did enormous damage to Chianti's reputation; the clonal selection programmes of the 1980s and 1990s, particularly the Chianti Classico 2000 project, are the main reason the region's wines improved so sharply.

It is a grape that responds badly to over-extraction and to new oak. Long maceration or heavy barriques bury its aromatics under wood and tannin, which is what many producers did in pursuit of international scores during the 1990s and what most have since stepped back from.

The savoury, sour-cherry-and-dried-tomato profile is the reason it works so well with food and the reason it can disappoint anyone expecting fruit. Sangiovese is a wine that makes far more sense at a table than in a tasting line-up, and it is close to unbeatable with anything involving tomato, olive oil and salt.