The legend of Brunello starts with the day a traveller arrived in the dirt-poor hill town of Montalcino. He wandered past its crumbly houses and into the fields, sniffing the air, poking the soil, inspecting the few olive trees and scribbling in a notebook. The soil was poor and he left. Montalcino resumed its decay.
The locals did not know that the stranger, Ezio Rivella, was euphoric and would soon return. He had found what he was seeking: a corner of the world capable of producing the greatest wine. A freak of nature had gifted the Tuscan town a unique microclimate.
Fast-forward to the present day and wealth oozes from the terraced vineyards, rebuilt medieval castle, the BMWs, polished stone streets and azalea-fringed restaurants. Squalor and emigration are a folk memory to the young people who flock here for money and jobs. Crinkly sommeliers tell tourists how the grace of nature and a centuries-old winemaking tradition saved Montalcino from oblivion.
Its salvation, Brunello, is a rich, powerful wine made from the Sangiovese grape. It is an object of acute desire hailed by connoisseurs and liable to fetch hundreds of pounds a bottle at Sotheby's auctions. Merchants clamour for the right to sell it. Two 1995 vintages have just been awarded five stars.
Demand far outstrips the strictly regulated supply. Those who get to taste it come away drooling adjectives such as intense, full-bodied, fruity, smooth, rich, chewy, velvety, super-ripe, spicy, gigantic. In the battle with the new world, Montalcino stands as a citadel of old world might and venerability.
War chronicles date the town's winemaking to before 1500 and labels tend to be adorned with knights, monks and peasants rather than the legendary Ezio Rivella. Not because no one knows what he looked like, but because he spoils the myth. Rivella arrived in 1977.
The Brunello fairy tale is a story of American corporate power buying up thousands of acres and imposing modern techniques to the horror of venerable but ailing low-quality local producers. Success has been achieved through market research, scientific analysis, mechanisation, high finance, advertising and, above all, money. Tonnes of it.
The Apennines in the north, and Mount Amiata in the south, shelter the vineyards from African and winter air currents, but success has whipped up a tailwind they are helpless to block. Competition and greed are threatening the region's new-found wealth and glory.
Rivella was - is - a famed oenologist. He was hired by the Mariani family, an Italian-American dynasty, to find the perfect spot to build a vineyard from scratch. His rovings stopped at Montalcino, an hour south of Siena.
In addition to its mountain protection, it was blessed with an elevation of 900 to 1200 ft and a location near the Mediterranean. The result was warm days, cool nights and just enough moisture to nourish a rugged, calcified soil. Just the place to invest £100 million.
Biondi Santi, a rival producer, released the first vintage from a clone of the Sangiovese grape in 1870, and established the wine as one of the highest class. Brunello was awarded its DOC classification in 1966, but the region remained largely unknown and unloved until the Marianis arrived. They called their company Banfi, after a Milanese aunt.
The communist mayor and traditionalists watched in stupefaction as Yankee dollars bank-rolled a convoy of bulldozers to carve Europe's largest contiguous wine estate: 7,100 acres.
Hugh Johnson, the wine writer, exulted. "The great wine estates of France have nothing to compare with it. In Italy, in Spain - indeed, in all of Europe - it is unique. Even the new world has no wine estate conceived on such a grand scale as the Castello Banfi."
Overlooked by a Romanesque fortress, the rugged landscape became sloping amphitheatres that trapped the sun and allowed proper drainage, supplied by six artificial lakes. Tractors, trucks and generators revved across the green and yellow hills, and hundreds of workers followed in their wake, planting row after row of cement stakes and vines.
No detail was overlooked. State-of-the-art equipment in the winery was fused with casks of Slavonian oak and barriques of French oak that preserved flavour and allowed wines to develop. The three-person harvesting teams that trundled up slopes - one driving, two cutting and picking - became female-only. "We learned that men didn't concentrate as well," says export manager Rodrigo Redmont.
Rivella experimented with 103 clones of Brunello before selecting the six that would catapult Banfi to acclaim. "There was suspicion at first but little by little the locals saw what we were up to and became enthusiastic," says Redmont.
Banfi's first vintage, in 1978, was not well received but refinement and money improved its quality and image through the 1980s until it hit the jackpot in 1990, the year in which Banfi's Brunello came of age, as far as the international market was concerned. Almost too rich to accompany food, it is taken by connoisseurs as an after-dinner drink. Prices have rocketed.
Its reputation was consolidated in 1995 with another five-star rating. Banfi was here to stay. That year's wine futures were sold out. Prices for the 1997 Brunellos rocketed yet higher. The market was seduced.
Brunello is one of the 20 Italian wines with the prized DOCG patent, which strictly controls its quality and output. For every 100 million bottles of Chianti sold each year, there are just 4 million bottles of Brunello, which each take five years to produce.
Brunello di Montalcino is Banfi's flagship but other brands such as Rosso di Montalcino, awarded five stars for its 1998 vintage, and Poggio all'Oro, have become fashionable. Banfi has been voted Italian winery of the year five consecutive times. "Unquestionably, the leader in Tuscany is Banfi," purred Wine News.
It was a fairytale. Wine flowed down Montalcino's hills, money, jobs and acclaim gushed back up. But the story does not end there. This week the pruners have been out in force, combing the hills while managers at the Castello plotted ambitious expansion. But a sourness is in the air.
The traditionalists still grumble that Banfi has destroyed a way of life with their machines and marketing, but even those who dismissed those who demurred as luddites are hesitating at the transformation taking place.
An array of competitors are muscling in on the region in the hope of grabbing some of the magic. From the five or six growers of 40 years ago there are now at least 130, according to Gambero Rosso, a food and wine magazine. They include wine producers such as Marchesi Frescobaldi and Robert Mondavi, as well as insurers like RAS. Land around Montalcino sells well above the average for Tuscany.
Environmentalists fear the scramble will damage the landscape. The Ilix, an ancient and officially protected tree, is disappearing. Hillsides near the monastery of San Antimo have been plained to destruction, says Ference Mate, a resident.
The new generation taking up tourist-related jobs in Montalcino is less than effusive in thanking Banfi. "Sure, they did a lot for this place, but we don't need a great big American company here any more - people would come anyway," says Alessia Salvioni (27), echoing many.
Fulvio Cristofolini, who owns La Fuga, a four-hectare estate, praised Banfi's quality but worried whether it and other giants would ultimately undermine Tuscany's brand identity.
Most serious of all, whispers are circulating that some vintners are cheating by incorporating grapes from other regions. Merchants are clamouring for more output, prices are high and the temptation is strong, says Piero Antinori, a vintner.
It went largely unreported, but last September the Italian fraud squad seized more than a quarter of a million gallons of southern Italian wine - more than 110,000 cases - that were bottled and falsely labelled as Tuscan wine with the Indicazione Geographica Tipica (IGT) designation. A separate scam tried to pass off another 1.3 million gallons of southern Italian wine as Toscana, according to the agriculture ministry.
No charges have been made and there is no suggestion that Banfi or the other major producers are involved, but misconduct by even just one small producer, if confirmed, would be a devastating scandal.
James Suckling, who lives in Tuscany and is the Wine Spectator's Europe correspondent, wrote: "It's all bad news for the region. Unscrupulous Tuscan wine producers are not only deceiving us but deceiving themselves.
"They could ruin the reputation of one of the most exciting wine regions in the world, an area that is only beginning to show its true potential. The good standing of hundreds of serious and sincere winemakers in Tuscany could be seriously tarnished."
The years since Ezio Rivella crumbled soil in his hands and smelt perfection have spawned an industry of ever greater wealth, sophistication and prestige. But each producer knows that the better they get, the more they have to lose. Success has bequeathed Brunello another adjective: fragile.