Typical Products in Chianti
All Chianti Typical Products
Typical products and tradition of Chianti
Un unforgettable experience of life, a leap in a different conception of time and space, a place of one’s own, a Tuscany which is that of the Leonardian backgrounds and of all the major Florentine artists’: Chianti is really a particular place of the soul.
But body has its needs too, and to breathe really Chianti atmosphere you have to taste with care and attention its typical products, expression of a very ancient country tradition .
Traditional ‘poor’ cuisine is made by very cheap ingredients or which, in the past, were considered waste food. Chianti cuisine teaches you to make a particular and attentive use of it so to exalt the taste of meals not easy to meet everywhere. Only in this area you can find rare beef cuts as head, feet, tail, gut, as well as the famous trippa, the lung, the ‘pici’ (a kind of pasta) dressed with duck’s sauce. Ancient tastes, really surprising for our refined palate.
Chianti oil
To make a good cuisine, the ingredients must be good, and in Tuscan cuisine extra-virgin olive oil is a basic ingredient. Therefore, Chianti makes a full-bodied, but elegant, oil, ideal to dress the best dishes of regional cuisine, and the not- to- renounce base for all recipes.
Anyway, the must of Chiantishire – as English call this land -, the very typical product of the area, is the wine.
Chianti wine
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in one of his Sherlock Holmes novels, showed dr Watson while drinking a glass of Chianti. It was the starting point of a love (that of English for Chianti) never to be died.
Since 1927 the makers of one of the most renown wines in the world united in a consortium for the protection and circulation of this precious nectar, exalted by an important DOC. Chianti wines can be produced just with grapes cultivated in the area, as set in the Disciplinary, and with grapevines Sangiovese (minimum 75%), Canaiolo nero (up to 10%), Trebbiano toscano and Malvasia del Chianti (up to 10%). But it’s the terroir to make so an important and wonderful wine: its bare, simple, deep Tuscan origin.
The Disciplinary ratify seven areas apt to produce Chianti DOC: Classico, Colli Aretini, Colli Fiorentini, Colli Senesi, Colline Pisane, Montalbano, Motespertoli and Rùfina, and two kinds of wine: Riserva and Superiore.
Origins of Chianti wine
History of Chianti wine is ancient: countrymen of Chianti squeezed their grapes since the remotest past, but until the XVIIIth century and part of the XIXth, they didn’t show attention to grapevines.
Baron Bettino Ricasoli, around the mid XVIIIth century, created the right blend, the same used today to ‘compose’ a true Chianti. Since then, the ‘recipe’ is always the same and Chianti can be tasted all around the world.
But poor dr Watson didn’t know that, drinking that famous Chianti glass, he missed a very important thing: the vista of Tuscan hills. You know, to taste really Chianti, you have to taste it in Chianti.