Italia's Wine Designations

Italy has several hundred wine designations divided up as IGTs, DOCs and DOCGs from over 100 provinces in 21 regions. Making wine in these appellations are nearly 1 million different vintners. Not surprisingly, many consider understanding Italian wine an insurmountable task and just drink Chianti or Pinot Grigio if they drink any Italian wine at all. If you'd like to understand better however, keep reading. Cultivation Vitis vinifera was introduced into the Italian peninsula by the Ancient Greeks and has been cultivated there for millennia. Today Italians have four classifications for their wines: Vino da Tavola, Indicazione Geografica Tipica, Denominazione di Origine Controllata and Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita.

Let's tackle them in historical order. Vino da Tavola is the lowest designation for Italian wines and literally means table wine, which in the US is also called jug wine. This is the cheap stuph, and the Italians drink alot of it. Next are the Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) wines which appeared in the late 1960s. This was Italia's first attempt at recreating France's successful appellation system. Specific land areas as well as specific grapes and production methods are specified for most DOCs, which are often merely classifications of wines which have been made in a place for centuries. See the full DOC list.

After complaints about the DOC system mounted up for a decade or so, instead of fixing it the Italian government added a new, higher designation called Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG). These wines are the crème de la crème of DOC wines and must also pass a blind taste test for quality. Many of the historically famous wines like Chianti, Barolo, Greco di Tufo, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, etc. are included in this designation. See the full DOCG list.

Just because the Italian government created another designation doesn't mean all Italian wine producers were happy though. Winemaking has evolved quite a bit with the scientific approaches of the 20th century and many excellent wines were being made in Italy which defied the traditions of that country. In the 1980's a number of winemakers in Toscana flouted the existing wine laws by making high quality, high priced wines which could only be classified as Vino da Tavola. These Super Tuscans upset the apple cart and led to the creation in the early 1990s of the Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT) system which, like the AVAs of the US, designated only the place where the grapes were grown and nothing about the methods used in their vinification. See the full IGT list