Antinori is the oldest name in Italian wine still making the wine, a Florentine family that has been at it for twenty-six generations and more than six hundred years. It is also the house that, in the 1970s, quietly blew up the rulebook of Tuscany. This is a full guide to Antinori and the range we stock at House of Decant.

The family began trading wine in Florence in 1385 and never really stopped, surviving plagues, wars and the collapse of empires while the vineyards stayed in the family's hands. Today, led by Marchese Piero Antinori and his daughters, it is one of the most important and admired wine producers on earth, and yet it still behaves like a family firm with something to prove.

The Wine That Rewrote the Rules

In 1971, Antinori did something close to heresy. It took Sangiovese, aged it in French barriques and blended in a little Cabernet, then bottled the result not as grand Chianti but as humble table wine, because the rules of the day forbade it. That wine was Tignanello, and it launched the entire Super Tuscan movement, proving that Tuscany could make reds to stand beside the greatest of Bordeaux. The rules eventually changed to catch up; Antinori had simply arrived first.

The Range We Stock

The house spans every level of Tuscan wine, and we carry it from the everyday to the iconic. Pèppoli is the friendly, cherry-bright Chianti Classico, an ideal introduction, while Badia a Passignano, from an eleventh-century abbey estate, is a serious Gran Selezione at the top of the Chianti pyramid. Above them sit the Marchese Antinori Riserva, the family putting its own name on the label, and Tignanello itself, the wine that started it all, alongside the estate's polished Pian delle Vigne Brunello di Montalcino.

What It Tastes Like

Antinori's Sangiovese has a signature: bright red and black cherry, dried herbs, a savoury, almost balsamic depth and a fine, gripping structure built for the table. Pèppoli is all easy charm; Badia a Passignano adds power and polish; and Tignanello is the grand statement, dense with dark fruit, tobacco and sweet French oak, a wine that ages for decades. Running through all of it is a sense of proportion, the mark of a family that has had six centuries to get the balance right.

How to Drink It

The Chianti wines are among the most food-friendly reds in the world, made for tomato-rich pasta, roast meats and hard cheese; serve them at cool room temperature and they flatter almost anything off an Italian table. Tignanello and the Brunello deserve a decant and a special occasion, and both will reward a decade in the cellar if you can wait.

Antinori sits at the heart of Tuscan wine. For the wider country see our Italian wine regions guide, and for more of the country's greats read our guide to the best Italian red wine.

Six hundred years is a long time to stay at the top of anything, let alone something as fickle as wine. Antinori has managed it by respecting tradition just enough to know exactly when to break it, and it is still, quietly, the first family of Italian wine.