Vintage: 1989
Denomination: Bolgheri Sassicaia DOC
Format: 1,500 LITERS
Type: Red
Blend: 85% Cabernet Sauvignon, 15% Cabernet Franc.
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 11/6/1974.

”…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 Dukes Salviati in Migliarino, I had drunk a wine produced by one of their vineyards on the mountain of Vecchiano that had the same unmistakable “bouquet” of an old Bordeaux that I had just tasted rather than drunk, (because at 14 years old I was not allowed to drink wine) before 1915, at my grandfather Chigi’s house.”

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

No one had ever thought of making a “Bordeaux” wine in Maremma, an area unknown from a winemaking point of view.

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

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

Each year, a few cases were put to age in the cellar in Castiglioncello.

The marquis soon realized that with age the wine improved considerably. As often happens with wines of great caliber, what had previously been considered defects, over time transformed into virtues.

Now friends and relatives encouraged Mario Incisa to further his experiments and perfect his revolutionary winemaking style for that area.

The 1968 vintage was the first to be released, 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 vats for fermentation, and French barriques were introduced for aging.