RARE GRAPE VARIETAL RESOURCE

Foglia Tonda is an Italian red wine grape with a precarious past. Twice forgotten and twice revived, it is now being lifted from oblivion by a number of enterprising winemakers in central Tuscany.

The rather elegant (and deceptively simple) name Foglia Tonda means simply "round leaf". But it is not the variety’s viticultural characteristics that make it of interest to the wine world, rather its qualities in the winery. Foglia Tonda grapes are valued for their deep pigmentation and the color boost they bring to wines. This makes it a particularly useful complement to Sangiovese, Tuscany’s most widely planted wine grape, which – for all its merits – definitely lacks depth of color. This color-adding role is also commonly performed by Colorino, a minor component in the most famous of all Sangiovese-based wines, Chianti.

For centuries the Foglia Tonda variety remained in obscurity, but was rediscovered in the 1870s by Giuseppe Conti de Rovasenda, one of Italy’s famous early ampelographers. Rovasenda took cuttings from the vineyards of Castello di Brolio, a vineyard owned by Barone Ricasoli. It was finally admitted to Italy's Registro Nazionale delle Varieta di Vite (national register of wine grape varieties) in May, 1970, but this did little to stimulate interest in Foglia Tonda as a variety; plantings remained negligible right up until the 1990s.

(Source: https://www.wine-searcher.com/...)

It is interesting to know that it was considered a variety in its own right until DNA analysis was made available, which revealed to be Foglia Tonda a hybridization (presumably occurred naturally) between a variety of vines still unknown and Sangiovese, for centuries widespread in Chianti vineyards.

http://www.vivc.de/index.php?r=passport%2Fview&id=4171

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