Castello di Brolio site features

Read the walls by their material and the whole history falls out. The various epochs are easily distinguished by the different use of the ancient building stone, pietra serena, and of brick. Of the castle proper only the base of the cassero, from the first years of the millennium, is recognisable as original; the well-preserved walls are typical of medieval-Renaissance architecture; everything in brick is 1835.

The plan is a pentagon. Repetti's description holds: solid walls with bastions and covered wall-walks, each angle furnished with embrasures and loopholes for spingarde, enclosing the baron's palace, the garden, the chapel, the estate buildings, the square tower and the meadow around the ramparts.

The manor on top of it is a romantic fantasy, and an honest one. Marchetti's 1835 work turned the fortress into an English manor, in brick, with Tudor-style windows and crenellated turrets that the record itself calls foreign to local architecture.

The gardens are two gardens. A sixteenth-century Italian garden with box hedges and paths, and a nineteenth-century romantic park willed by the botanist Simone Ricasoli, who planted imported species around the castle — among them firs that have now reached 30 to 40 metres.

The chapel holds the family. The cappella di San Jacopo, renewed 1867–1869, has a gabled facade preceded by a double stone stair and a mosaic of its titular saint in the portal lunette; to the right of the entrance an inscription recalls the foundation in 1348. Inside, a nave in three cross-vaulted bays over a crypt where the Ricasoli are buried, with altar mosaics executed from 1874 by the Compagnia Venezia Murano after cartoons by Alessandro Franchi still kept in the castle.

And the castle kept a fourteenth-century polyptych by Ugolino di Nerio: a Madonna and Child between Saints Peter, Paul, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.

The 1874 blend

The reason this castle matters beyond Tuscany. After years of trials with Pinot, Cabernet, Grenache and Carignano, Bettino Ricasoli settled on the clones of Sangiovese di Brolio — a variety still in the estate's vines, because replantings have almost always used autochthonous material — and in 1874 defined the uvaggio for Chianti Classico. The production rules of the most famous Italian wine were inspired by it almost a century later.

Pietra serena below, brick above

The single most useful thing to know before looking. Everything in grey sandstone is old; everything in brick is Pietro Marchetti's Gothic Revival remodelling of 1835, which gave the fortress Tudor windows and crenellated turrets foreign to local architecture.

Two gardens, two centuries

A Cinquecento Italian garden of box hedges and gravelled paths, and an Ottocento romantic park created by the botanist Simone Ricasoli, whose imported firs now stand 30 to 40 metres high around the walls.

The chapel and the crypt

San Jacopo, founded in 1348 per the inscription by its door and renewed 1867–69: a double stair, a mosaic lunette, three cross-vaulted bays and the Ricasoli crypt beneath. Its altar mosaics were made from 1874 by the Compagnia Venezia Murano to designs by Alessandro Franchi.

An export record older than the formula

A notarial act of 1696 secured a cargo of fine wines leaving Livorno for Amsterdam; in 1722 the Duke of Norfolk wrote to a Brolio representative in London for "fifty or more cases of the true Chianti" every month; in 1773 Pietro Leopoldo recorded a farm making "a thousand barrels of wine, exquisite, in the taste of Carmignano but lighter". By the 1940s Brolio's wines reached every continent.

Where the Eroica climb begins

Ricasoli are historic supporters and global sponsor of L'Eroica, and the estate's Eroica-styled rooms sit exactly where the dramatic climb to the Castello di Brolio starts — the one the riders meet shortly after the start line at Gaiole.