Bolgheri is a village on the Tuscan coast in the province of Livorno, behind a cypress avenue five kilometres long that Giosuè Carducci put into a poem. Its vineyards lie on the alluvial gravel, sand and clay of the plain and the low hills behind, with the Tyrrhenian a few kilometres west and the Colline Metallifere sheltering them from the east.

Nothing of consequence was made here until Mario Incisa della Rocchetta planted Cabernet Sauvignon at Tenuta San Guido in the 1940s because he preferred Bordeaux. The wine, Sassicaia, was first sold commercially in 1968, outside the appellation system altogether, and its success rewrote the rules for Italian wine. Bolgheri became a DOC in 1983 and Sassicaia was given an appellation of its own in 2013, the only single estate DOC in Italy. The reds are Cabernet and Merlot led, warm and dense, and Vermentino makes the white.