Sangiovese's Many Faces: One Grape, Five Towns

We ended Part 1 with a promise: that the fun of Sangiovese is in the differences, and that the way to feel them is to travel. So let's travel. Load the same grape onto five different hillsides and it comes back wearing five different faces — leaner here, darker there, riper by the coast. Nothing about the vine changes. Everything about the wine does. Here's the map, west to east and cool to warm, and how to read each stop on it.

Chianti Classico — the archetype

Start where the story is anchored, in the historic hills of Chianti Classico between Florence and Siena. This is Sangiovese in its purest, most quoted form: red cherry and dried herbs, a tomato-leaf savour, and a grip of acid and tannin that all but drags a plate of food to the table. The hills here are high and cool, the soils the pale galestro schist and alberese limestone that Tuscans will lecture you about with real feeling, and the altitude keeps the wine tense and lifted rather than fat.

At least 80% Sangiovese by law, often the full 100%, sealed with the black rooster — the Gallo Nero — on the neck. It climbs in three tiers: easygoing Annata to drink young, sturdier Riserva, and the top Gran Selezione, an estate-grown category that increasingly names the single village or vineyard it came from. If you only ever learn one Sangiovese, learn this one; every other face is a variation on it. (And don't confuse it with plain "Chianti" from the wider zone beyond these hills — a genuinely different wine, worth its own comparison.)

Brunello di Montalcino — the grand one

Now drop forty minutes south to the hill town of Montalcino, and watch the same grape put on weight. It's warmer down here, drier, further from the cooling pull of the Apennines, and Sangiovese ripens fuller and deeper as a result. The town also insists on purity: Brunello is 100% Sangiovese, no blending partners allowed, and it's aged for years — a long stretch of it in oak — before a bottle is ever released.

The result is the grandest thing the grape does. Young Brunello is dense and tightly wound; give it a decade and it opens into dried fig, tobacco, leather and sweet baking spice, all riding over that unshakeable sour-cherry-and-savour core. This is the Sangiovese built to wait, and the reason a serious bottle costs what it costs. Montalcino also makes a younger, friendlier version — Rosso di Montalcino, released early — which is the smart way to taste the town's fruit without cellaring anything. Think of Rosso as Brunello with its shoes off.

Vino Nobile di Montepulciano — the underrated middle

East again to Montepulciano, a Renaissance hill town that hides its cellars under its own streets, and to the most overlooked of the great Sangioveses. Here the grape is called Prugnolo Gentile, the "gentle little plum," and the wine it makes — Vino Nobile — sits neatly between Chianti's brightness and Brunello's power: polished, perfumed, plush without being heavy. It was the wine of popes and the nobility once, hence the name, and it has never quite recovered the fame that history implies it deserves. That's your opportunity: Vino Nobile is routinely the best value of the three.

One warning that trips up everyone. The town is Montepulciano and the wine is Vino Nobile di Montepulciano — but it is not made from the Montepulciano grape, which is an entirely different variety grown mostly over in Abruzzo. One word, two wines, endless confusion. Blame five centuries of central Italy naming things after wherever it happened to be standing.

Morellino di Scansano — the sunny one

Head down to the coast, into the wild, wide-open Maremma, and Sangiovese changes name again — to Morellino — and changes character with it. There's more sun down here and less altitude, so the grape ripens rounder, riper and plummier, with softer tannins and a generous, immediate charm. Morellino di Scansano is the one you open tonight, not the one you cellar for a decade: a red for the table on a warm evening, not a monument.

It's the friendliest face the grape wears, and after a run of serious inland wines it can feel like the sun coming out. The Maremma was malarial marshland within living memory and is now Tuscany's value frontier, which means Morellino tends to over-deliver for what you pay — a very Maremma thing to do.

Romagna — the sleeper

Now leave Tuscany entirely, cross the Apennines, and drop into the hills of Romagna — the eastern half of Emilia-Romagna, out toward the Adriatic. This is Sangiovese's other homeland, and the one nobody talks about. For years it meant cheerful, gulpable trattoria red, the wine that washes down Bologna's ragù and Rimini's fried fish without asking for attention.

But something's been happening in the better hillside villages. In sub-zones like Predappio, Bertinoro and Modigliana — official "additional geographic mentions" that flag the good crus — growers are making Romagna Sangiovese with real ambition, structure and site character, at a fraction of Tuscan money. If you want the smug pleasure of drinking well ahead of the market, this is where the grape is quietly brilliant and almost nobody's looking. We'll come back to Romagna in Part 5, because it's also the best-value place to actually go and taste.

The costumes beyond the famous five

The five stops above are the ones to know cold, but the grape doesn't stop there. West of Florence, tiny Carmignano has blended a little Cabernet into its Sangiovese since the 18th century — centuries before anyone called that daring — with a papal decree to protect it. Up in Umbria, one family in the little town of Torgiano built a whole appellation around Sangiovese; Lungarotti makes the region's benchmark ageworthy red there, proof the grape carries its class across the Tuscan border. And then there are the Super Tuscans — the single-vineyard, rule-breaking Sangioveses that took the grape out of the appellation system entirely to prove a point. That fight is a story in itself, and we'll tell it properly in Part 4.

Reading the map

Step back and the pattern is clean: cool and high gives you tension and savour (Chianti, the best Romagna); warm and low gives you flesh and ease (Morellino, everyday Romagna); and where a town decides to take the grape utterly seriously — pure, low-yielding, long-aged — you get the monuments (Brunello, top Vino Nobile). Altitude, sun and ambition, in other words, not the grape. The grape is the constant.

Which raises the obvious question, and it's the one that runs under this whole series: if the vine never changes, how does it do all this? What is it about Sangiovese — its skin, its acid, its clones, the way a cellar handles it — that lets one grape stretch from a Tuesday-night carafe to a wine that outlives the person who bought it? That's the machinery under the costumes, and it's next. Part 3 — Structure, clones and style opens the vine up and shows you how Sangiovese is actually built.