Cortona D.O.C.

Cortona, a small tuscan city, perched up on a hillside verdant with olive-trees, vineyards and cypresses, looks out over the Valdichiana offering a stunning view of this fruitful plain, hemmed in on the horizon by rolling gentle hills and the expanse of the Trasimeno Lake.
As the legend told by Virgil has it, Cortona was founded by legendary Dardanus before 500 B.C. and has since been prodigal with important testimonies of great historical, artistic and cultural interest. Cortona, a city-state in etruscan times and a cradle of the arts in the renaissance and baroque period when it was home to prominent artists such as Beato Angelico, Pietro da Cortona and later in time to Gino Severini, has all along been very active in the field of vine-growing.

Tradition and historical evidence bring the origin of vine-growing in the Cortona area back to etruscan times when vines, thanks to the favourable climate conditions of the territory, were first planted applying the so-called "live-support" technique, integrating thus this new cultivation with the growing of other arboreal crops.
Many amphoras and vases belonging to the remaining etruscan funerary art patrimony depict banquet scenes portraying figures caught in the act of drinking wine from goblets. Those very same amphoras might have, so according to experts'studies, been used to carry wine. Written testimony by Plinius the Young describes in great detail the excellent wines of Etruria, expressing particular admiration for the qualities of a wine called "Estesiaca", produced in the Cortona district.

A long pause in the wine production in the whole of the Valdichiana was forced upon the area by the degenaration of the very same valley into an insalubrious swamp whose later reclamation was to bear fruit only in the second half of the 16th century. Back in those days Cortona wines were particularly prized by pope Paul III who, as reported by a document belonging to his bottler, Sante Lancerio, today in the Biblioteca Civica of Ferrara, during his stays in Perugia, had wine delivered from Cortona for his banquets. The Napoleonic occupation caused in the area the diffusion of international vines, championed by the Grand duke of Tuscany, a man with marked xenophilous inclinations. In this period oenologist De Astis stated that the Bianco Vergine della Valdichiana was imported to France by Champagne-makers, due to the fact that this particular vine proved to be remarkably suitable for the production of the world-famous dessert-wine in a time when french-vines were plagued by vine pest. Papers kept in the Istituto Vegni also report the export of several hundreds of litres to Switzerland.

In light of its great variety of wines, the "Cortona" lends itself to a vast choice of local dishes: pastas and first courses, meats, wild game and, of course, desserts, with its "Vinsanto" variety. The production area of the Cortona DOC includes all lands devoted to quality wine-growing within the Cortona municipality. Vine implantation is allowed only over 750 ft. above sea level.