Sassicaia
In the 1920s, as a student in Pisa, Mario Incisa della Rocchetta dreamed of creating a thoroughbred 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 Salviati Dukes in Migliarino, I drank a wine produced from one of their vineyards on Mount Vecchiano which had the same unmistakable “bouquet” of an old Bordeaux that I just tasted rather than drank, (because at 14 I wasn't allowed to drink wine) before 1915, at my grandfather Chigi's house.”

Having settled with his wife Clarice on the Tenuta San Guido on the Tyrrhenian coast, he experimented with some French vines (whose cuttings he had recovered from the Salviati Dukes' estate 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 unknown area 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, due to the stony soil that distinguishes the area, just like Sassicaia, in Tuscany, he names an area with the same characteristics.

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


Every year, a few cases were left to age in the Castiglioncello cellar.

The Marquis soon realized that the wine improved considerably as it aged. As often happens with wines of great caliber, those that were previously considered defects, over time, were transformed into virtues.

Now friends and relatives urged Mario Incisa to delve deeper into his experiments and perfect his revolutionary winemaking style for that area.

The 1968 vintage was the first to be put on the market, 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.