The only Italian wine that can boast such a long history and renown, and one of the very few worldwide, since its name first appeared in 1276 in the Gabelle of San Gimignano, Vernaccia has become the “queen” of the tables of popes and kings throughout Europe.
A “regal” and “precious” white wine, and the only wine in Tuscany with a feminine name, perhaps it is also for this reason that it caught the attention of the greatest poets: from Dante, who made it the only wine mentioned by name in the “Divine Comedy” to Boccaccio, who lets it flow in a “little river” in the Land of Plenty in the “Decameron”, from Folgòre da San Gimignano to Cecco Angiolieri, from Eustache Deschamps to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Ludovico Il Moro to Lorenzo the Magnificent, from Francesco Redi, who even curses those who don’t enjoy it in “Bacchus in Tuscany” to Sante Lancerio, sommelier to Pope Paul III Farnese, and from Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger at the court of Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, where it was so “admired” that in the sixteenth century Giorgio Vasari depicted it in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
