The drinks business Lifetime Achievement Award: PIERO ANTINORI

His family has made wine for over 600 years and he has headed up the business for the last 40. Julie Sheppard celebrates the life of Marchese Piero Antinori

“This award coincides with an important anniversary,” says Marchese Piero Antinori, recipient of the 2007 Institute of Masters of Wine and the drinks business Lifetime Achievement Award, “because this year is my 40th year of being responsible for the house of Antinori.” Such long service alone merits an award, yet even more impressively, 68-year-old Antinori represents the 26th generation of his family of Italian winemakers.

The house of Antinori traces its history back to 1385, when Giovanni di Piero Antinori joined the Florentine Guild of Vintners. However, the company assumed its recognisable form in 1898 when the Fattoria dei Marchesi Lodovico e Piero Antinori was created. Two years later Antinori’s grandfather, Piero, bought several vineyards in the Chianti Classico region, laying the foundation for Antinori’s Super Tuscan revolution 70 years later.

Piero’s son Niccolò quickly made a name for himself by unconventionally including Bordeaux grapes in his Chianti wines, as well as experimenting with new types of barrel, temperature control and bottle ageing. Niccolò’s innovative spirit rubbed off on his own son, born in Florence in 1939. “My father inspired me and transferred to me the passion for the product and the passion for the business,” remembers Antinori, who assumed control of the company when Niccolò retired in 1966.

Old and new
This passing on of family values is central to Antinori’s philosophy of the wine business. “Some values are very important to our business and these are transferred from generation to generation: the passion for the product. It’s not difficult to have this passion and to be able to transfer it to a new generation – like my father did with me and my grandfather with my father and so on for the last five or six centuries in our family,” he says. Paradoxically, Antinori has combined this traditionalist view with a dynamic and forward-thinking approach to making wine. “To continue to produce wine like my grandfather or my great grandfather would be a mistake, because now technology has evolved and we are able to produce better wines than in the past,” he explains.

Antinori’s willingness to embrace change was clearly demonstrated by the launch of Tignanello in 1971. Made by blending Cabernet Sauvignon with Sangiovese and aged in small oak barriques, Tignanello broke the Chianti Classico mould and became a shining star in the Super Tuscan revolution. Although not the first Super Tuscan – that honour goes to Sassicaia, created by another Antinori family member, Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta, Tignanello provoked far-reaching changes in both appellation laws and attitudes to Italian wines.

Renaissance man

Thirty-six years later Antinori acknowledges the effects of Tignanello’s success. “There have been big changes everywhere in the wine world. But in Tuscany in the last 30 or 40 years there has been a revolution,” he says. “From centuries of winemaking oriented towards quantity, we have finally moved towards a totally different approach to winemaking which is focusing much more on quality. I call it a renaissance of Italian wines,” he continues, pointing out with typically Florentine pride that, like the cultural and artistic renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries, this wine renaissance was also born on the banks of the Arno.

This renaissance is just one of the major changes that Antinori has witnessed during his lifetime in the wine trade and he speaks candidly of the challenges of making and selling wine in an increasingly competitive global arena. In particular he believes that the New World has been a positive influence on Old World producers. “The New World has been very aggressive in terms of marketing and I think that has been a very good and healthy thing,” he explains. “It has caused the Old World to become more competitive, to be more innovative and to find new ways of improving quality, while at the same time controlling production costs in order to continue to be competitive with the New World.”

In much the same way that he cherishes family values, Antinori believes that Old World producers need to cherish the individual identity of their wines in the face of New World competition. “I think that looking at the future, with our tradition, with our culture, with our native grape varieties, we will continue to produce wines with a personality, with regionality… which will continue to be competitive in a global market – even if we have new competitors.”

Looking ahead
He is also optimistic for the future of quality wines. “Around the world wine consumption in general is flat, but quality wine consumption is going up and I think this will continue in the future,” he says. “There are new countries, new markets that are now starting to approach wine and appreciate wine. The young generation seems to me to be more and more inclined to enjoy wine and become more accustomed to drinking wine every day, with a meal. And I see that not only in the United States or England, but also in the Far East for instance, where wine consumption is starting to be a part of the culture. At the moment it’s a limited number of people, but it’s increasing every day. Wine is such a fantastic complement for food that sooner or later countries like China will certainly become much more used to drinking wine,” he believes. 

What about the future for Antinori’s own company? “I don’t think that our company should become bigger and bigger, because quality is the crucial factor and so our main objective is to continue to focus on the high quality of the product.” To this end Antinori has already spread his wings beyond his Tuscan homeland, buying estates in other parts of Italy such as Piedmont and Puglia, as well as investing in wineries in other parts of the world. To date his company currently has joint ventures in Hungary, California, Washington State and Chile. “With these partnerships or associations in other parts of the world we can learn something and help our winemakers to exchange experiences with other cultures and traditions,” explains Antinori. “So I want to become more international – not to become bigger, but to get more experience and to become more and more able to produce higher quality.”

Family ties

Unsurprisingly, the role of family also remains fundamental to Antinori’s vision of the future. “First of all my hope and ambition is to see the company continue to be a family-owned company. In the quality wine business to be a family business is an asset and it’s very important,” he says. His three daughters, Albiera (41), Allegra (36) and Alessia (32) are already involved in the company and Antinori is clearly proud that they are continuing the family tradition. “The values that have been transferred from my ancestors through generation after generation to me, I have transferred to my daughters and I feel quite comfortable about how they are doing. In order to do well in our type of business you need to love the business, to love the product, and I think this is the first thing that I have tried to transfer to my daughters. I have no doubt that they have absorbed these values. I hope that this Lifetime Achievement Award will encourage them to give back to wine at least a part of what they have received from wine,” he adds.

Is there one piece of advice that he would give to the next generation of Antinoris? “You cannot be in too much of a hurry. You have to be patient and accept the rules of mother nature, accept that one vintage might not be a good vintage, accept the fact that when a vineyard is young it cannot produce very good wines, you have to wait. And I think this is something that you learn from the tradition of a family. Not to take short cuts is a value that has been transferred from generation to generation. Not many people understand that. I see many people who have been very successful in other types of business and decide to get into the wine business. They want to arrive very quickly at their final goal, at success. And I think that’s a mistake, you cannot take short-cuts.” Fitting final words from a man who has spent a lifetime achieving his dreams.

© db­ July 2007