Along with the Piedmont, Tuscany is Italy's most important wine-producing area. Chianti, Brunello, Vino Nobile, and Vin Santo are known all over the world, as are the ""Super Tuscans,"" a large group of important, high-quality reds born in the early 1970s and now representing some of Italy's best wines. Back then, producers began chafing under the restrictive regulations of the DOC (Denominazione di Origin Controllata). Some sought to avoid using certain legally recommended grape varieties, such as the Italian white grapes that were considered an integral part of Chianti; others started blending Cabernet and Merlot, which at the time were proscribed, with native grape varieties.

While Tuscany offers a plethora of riches to the wine lover, some of its most famous Tuscan wines, especially Chianti and Brunello, are experiencing a slump in sales. There are many reasons for this, beginning with a steep rise in prices over the last five or ten years. There has also been a wave of new, moneyed owners who have not let their lack of winemaking experience get in the way of buying a piece of this beautiful region. This has opened the floodgate for oenological consultants, many of whom work for numerous estates in the same area but routinely apply their tried-and-true recipe to winemaking, leading to the production of Tuscan wines that resemble one another to a dismaying degree. Add to this the insistence on making deeply colored wines that are often overconcentrated, overoaked, and charmless, and you begin to have a good idea of why Chianti and some other Tuscan red wines don't sell all that well anymore. Fortunately, producers have begun to recognize these errors, prices have finally stopped rising, and, mercifully, more trees are being allowed to live as less importance is afforded to new oak barrels.

Italy, like France, offers a world of wine styles within a single country: dry Italian white wines ranging from lively and minerally to powerful and full-bodied; cheap and cheerful Italian red wines in both a cooler, northern style and a richer, warmer southern style; structured, powerful reds capable of long aging in bottle; sparkling wines; sweet wines and dessert wines.

Most of Italy enjoys a relatively warm climate, and the southern portion of the country can be particularly hot in the summer months. However, Italy's Apennine mountain chain, which traverses the country from north to south, provides an almost infinite number of soil types and exposures, as well as favored hillside sites in virtually every region, where vines can be cultivated at higher, cooler altitudes. Mountainous terrain has also resulted in the segregation of many small wine regions, enabling dozens of indigenous grape varieties to survive in near isolation. Here, Italy markedly differs from most of the wine world, which is becoming increasingly international in nature.

But Italian wine, as most North Americans know it, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the 1950s, only a tiny proportion of Italy's wines were even bottled by the farmer who grew the grapes. Most Italian wine was consumed by the local market. The Italian government's DOC system (Denominazione di Origine Controllata), created in the 1960s, imposed more explicit standards and thereby improved Italian wine quality while at the same clarifying the labeling of wines and thus making it far easier for Italian producers to ship their wines abroad. (Today DOCG -- Controllata e Garantita -- is theoretically the highest level in the quality pyramid of Italian wine, with this special status more recently granted to such historically important Italian wine areas as Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello di Montalcino and others: areas that had previously enjoyed DOC status for at least five years.)

Of course, some of the most innovative Italian wine makers quickly began to look for ways to escape the restrictions of this system. They believed that DOC laws actually prevented them from making the best possible wines -- for example, by proscribing the use of certain grape varieties or by requiring them to age their wines in wood barrels longer than they believed was beneficial in some years. Those with a more independent bent essentially opted out of the system, instead producing wines that were simply classified as Vini da Tavola (table wines) but that in a number of cases surpassed the "official" best Italian wines in quality and price. (A new law passed in 1992 created the IGT category, or Indicazione Geografica Tipica, for the innovative Vini da Tavola for which DOCs were not yet created.) These trailblazers have revolutionized Italian wine over a period in which French wines have merely "evolutionized."