A marchese, a marriage and a stony field.

Sassicaia is a wine rather than a company. It is made by Tenuta San Guido, the Incisa della Rocchetta family’s estate at Bolgheri, in the comune of Castagneto Carducci near the coast of Tuscany. Its name comes from sasso, stone, and refers to a stony stretch of land within the estate, English Wikipedia and the estate say.

The land came to the family through marriage. The marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, from a Piedmontese family, studied agriculture at Pisa and in 1930 married Clarice della Gherardesca, whose family property included some 2,500 hectares at Bolgheri, the estate says; the couple moved to the Maremma in the 1940s. They shared an older passion for thoroughbreds: from 1932, the estate says, they were partners of the breeder Federico Tesio in the racing stable later called Razza Dormello Olgiata, whose horses included Ribot, which the estate says was unbeaten in 16 races. English Wikipedia also describes Mario as a co-owner of Ribot.

Mario Incisa saw a likeness between the gravelly soils of his Bolgheri land and the Graves district of Bordeaux, the estate says, and concluded that Cabernet “has the bouquet I was looking for.” With cuttings from the Salviati dukes at Migliarino, near Pisa, he planted the first Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard in 1944 — just over a hectare at about 400 metres, at Castiglioncello di Bolgheri. Italian Wikipedia gives 1944 as the year of the first bottles and English Wikipedia says the wine was first produced in 1948, so the sources differ on the first vintage. From 1945 to 1967, the estate says, Sassicaia remained strictly private, kept for family and friends; years later the marchese called its birth a “simple vague experiment.”

From the family table to its own DOC.

The change came with the next generation. Nicolò Incisa della Rocchetta, Mario’s younger son, began working alongside his father in the 1960s after an economics degree at Geneva, the estate says. English Wikipedia says Nicolò and Mario’s nephew Piero Antinori persuaded the marchese to release the wine commercially. The estate says the family’s kinship with the Antinori, through the della Gherardesca side, put Mario in touch with the young oenologist Giacomo Tachis, and that together they made the first Bordeaux-style blend in Bolgheri’s history, the start of a collaboration that lasted more than 40 years.

The first vintage sold was the 1968, which reached the market in 1971, according to both the estate and English Wikipedia. The estate credits the critic Luigi Veronelli as the first to recognise the wine, quoting his 1974 note in Panorama praising its uncommon, reserved elegance. As new vineyards were planted away from the hilltop, the estate says, production and ageing moved in the mid-1970s from Castiglioncello di Bolgheri to a new cellar at the start of the Viale dei Cipressi, the cypress avenue.

The appellation followed the wine. When the Bolgheri DOC was created in 1994, Sassicaia became a subzone within it; at the end of 2013, by decree of Italy’s agriculture ministry, it became a DOC in its own right, Bolgheri Sassicaia, Italian Wikipedia says. The denomination covers a specific zone of Castagneto Carducci and requires at least 80 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, and only Tenuta San Guido, which owns all the vineyards in the delimited area, can use it. The estate calls Sassicaia the first Italian wine from a single producer to have a denomination reserved for it.

For decades it was the estate’s only wine. Nicolò Incisa used to say he wanted to be the producer of one wine, Sassicaia, the estate says, before Merlot was planted along the cypress avenue in the 1990s. Guidalberto, named after Guidalberto della Gherardesca, an early-19th-century agricultural pioneer of the Bolgheri area, followed with the 2000 vintage, and Le Difese, whose label shows a boar’s tusks in gold, with the 2002 vintage.

Italy’s icon wines.

The seven brands in this group are all Italian wine houses and labels: Gaja, Sassicaia, Ornellaia, Tignanello, Allegrini, Zenato and Pio Cesare. Wine houses and labels in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that belong to a larger wine group or estate, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a wine shop to a restaurant list.

A wine brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, bought new vineyards or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family estate on the cypress avenue.

Tenuta San Guido remains in the Incisa della Rocchetta family. The estate’s history page names Nicolò Incisa as honorary president and says that over the past 15 years he has built and led a team of managers. It says the family’s third generation of winemakers is represented by five cousins, with his daughter Priscilla Incisa della Rocchetta responsible for external relations. English Wikipedia lists the estate as a member of Primum Familiae Vini.

The wine is grown and made on the estate. Vines cover only about 5 percent of its 2,500 hectares, the estate says, with Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot in separate parcels at around 80 metres and between 250 and 400 metres. The rest of the property includes olive groves, a training centre for the racing stable and the Padule di Bolgheri wildlife refuge, and the winemaking team is coordinated by Carlo Paoli, according to the estate’s website.

Its presentation is restrained. The estate’s website is set in the serif Cormorant Infant and opens its history with a line from Mario Incisa’s own writing about respect for nature; it also quotes the poet Giosuè Carducci’s memories of the land around Bolgheri, where he spent his boyhood. In 2018, Italian Wikipedia says, the 50 years since Sassicaia was first sold were marked with a vertical tasting at Lucca.

For a design guide, Sassicaia shows how the name of a single wine can come to stand for its estate, to the point of having an appellation named after it. Compare Antinori, the Florentine family whose Piero Antinori helped bring Sassicaia to market, and Ornellaia, another Bolgheri estate in this series. For this guide we use cypress green, stone and a Cabernet red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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