Viniculture in the Italy of the Mezzadria (Tuscany, Umbria and Marche)

Tuscany is one of the regions where the take off of the modern Italian wine industry began. At the end of the nineteenth century we see the effects of agrarian renewal carried out by figures like Bettino Ricasoli, an incarnation of the long tradition of agronomic reformism begun in Florence towards the end of the eighteenth century. But Tuscany together with Umbria and Marche are par excellence the regions of sharecropping (mezzadria), the agrarian pact of medieval origin considered in the contemporary age as a halt to the modernization of agriculture. In reality, however, as the evolution of the wine sector shows, the sharecropping contract did not prevent the consolidation of a more advanced way of practising winemaking. At the end of the nineteenth century the “Tuscan wine” was born and subsequently the fame of the Chianti also came among the international elites attracted by the myth of the capital of the Renaissance. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, wine houses formed with a clear commercial vocation. In the wake of a sector increasingly open to exports and an entrepreneurial approach, the debate began on the protection and recognition of the designation of origin. In the 1930s the first laws arrived to define the production areas of Chianti and Orvieto. In the second post-war the trajectory of Chianti demonstrates the difficulties of the institutional context to arrive at the definition of the DOC. However, and once the phase of long political debate has been overcome, since the 1980s, Central Italy has seen a real enological breakthrough, as demonstrated by the phenomenon of “super-tuscan”. Montalcino, Montefalco and Jesi are some symbolic places of renewal. The effects of the end of sharecropping are grasped when the high-quality viticulture offered to many former tenants the possibility of becoming small entrepreneurs. An evolution accompanied by the transformation of the regions of central Italy into a privileged destination for rural tourism. As the essay demonstrates, the evolution of the oenological sector is a synthesis of the socio-economic evolution of the contemporary Italian countryside.