The Brothers A

He stands behind the table, pouring one of his white wines for a novice taster. The heat and humidity in the ballroom are stifling, and all the other people at the wine tasting have long since shed their jackets and ties, but he keeps his jacket buttoned and his tie crisply knotted as he patiently discusses one of his least expensive wines.

Few in the room know this is Marchese Piero Antinori, scion of a Florentine family that has been powerful for centuries in the silk trade, politics, commerce and Chianti wine. The title marchese (or marquis) means much in Italy, yet Piero Antinori wears his mantle with grace and good humor. Even in the steamiest locales, he maintains his aristocratic air. You’ll find him pouring wine long after the heads of several other wineries have fled the room.

Another time, another place: Another Antinori walks to a wall in his office and raises a tattooed right arm. He wears shorts that show muscled legs and canvas shoes with no socks, and he points to a plaque on the wall attesting to his prowess as a member of a tandem sky-diving team. Just outside the door is a motorcycle with California plates, mysteriously left there some years ago by “someone who owed me a little money.”

Lodovico Antinori is also a marchese and, like his older brother, he makes acclaimed wine. There the resemblances end. The differences between the two brothers are reflected in the wines they make. Piero’s properties produce refined, graceful wines; Lodovico’s are more rough-hewn, bold and brassy.

Piero is the better known of the two. He lives at Palazzo Antinori in the heart of Florence with his wife, the former Roman princess Francesca Boncompagni Ludovisi. They have three grown daughters. The family is at the center of Italian society.

The brothers once co-owned the family firm, Marchesi L & P Antinori. But after a complex series of deals, Piero, 52, is virtually the sole owner. Lodovico, 47, no longer actively involved, still owns 1% of the family firm, having sold his interest to his brother.

Even though the Antinori family made wine for six centuries before Piero became its head, he is the most forward-thinking of any in family history. He and his winemaker, Giacomo Tachis, make avant-garde wines and traditional wines with equal skill.

Today, 20 years after the transformation of the firm with modern winemaking techniques, Marchesi L & P Antinori represents the standard by which other Italian wines are judged. They may not always be the best wines of a given vintage, but they offer a reliability and consistency few producers can boast.

Many of the advances at Antinori came despite local opposition. There is no more obvious case than his breakthrough wine, Tignanello. First made in 1971, it represented a break with tradition in tradition-bound Chianti. Here the Sangiovese grape, the basis of Chianti, was blended with 10% Cabernet Sauvignon and aged in new French oak barrels, a procedure not widely used in Italy at the time until then.

Because it didn’t conform to the old “Chianti recipe” of the Barone Bettino Ricasoli, Tignanello was viewed as a heretic, doomed to be labeled with the pejorative term vino da tavola-- a term reserved for the lowest form of Italian table wine. Thanks in great part to Antinori’s efforts, that term today denotes some of the highest quality wine.

He acknowledges that he set out to reform the face of Italian wine after visiting other wine-making areas in the early 1970s. He was building a winery to make white wine from central Italy with grapes of little repute, such as Procanico and Grechetto.

“In those days, Italian white wines were not very interesting or with any character,” he says. “The objective was to do something in the opposite direction. The technology for white wines was not very good, so I went to Germany and California to see what was the most modern technique for white wine.”

What he saw was eye-opening--temperature-controlled stainless-steel fermentation tanks; a sterile bottling line that put inert gas into the bottle to protect the wine from oxidizing and other advances. He installed all the new equipment at his new winery. Reaction was mixed.

“The wines were fresher than we had ever made them, and many local consumers were disappointed,” he says. “But we gained attention very, very quickly in other countries.”

One superb example of the new style of white wine is 1990 Cervaro della Sala ($21), a Chardonnay blended with 20% Grechetto for acidity. This wine is a classic example of fine winemaking, with complex, citrus-y aromas and a balance that makes it perfect for matching with food.

He also pioneered methods to improve Chianti. Antinori never directly criticized the old style of Chianti. But he says: “The more I travel and the more I see and try, the more I realize that Tuscany is the place where great things can be done.”

A good example of an Antinori Chianti is 1989 Peppoli ($14), a fresh, tart, complex wine that shows traces of earth, roses and truffles. The wine is young and could use a few years of age but is perfectly drinkable today.

One important thing Antinori did show the traditionalists was that wine such as this might fetch $20 or more a bottle in the United States and England--a compelling argument since old-style Chianti was selling for a fraction of that in Italy. Tignanello spawned a whole school of so-called “super-Tuscan” vini da tavola that routinely sell for $50 and more today. He is also involved in a joint venture to produce Sangiovese with Atlas Peak Vineyards in the Napa Valley.

There are three Antinori estates on the Tuscan coast near the town of Bolgheri. Piero’s estate is Belvedere di Bolgheri. On one side of it is a property called Sassicaia, owned by a cousin. On the other side is his brother Lodovico’s 250-acre property, Tenuta dell’Ornellaia.

Ten years ago, after trying his hand at photojournalism and film making, Lodovico came back to wine. He planted 35 acres and built a large winery.

His wines are as different from those made by his brother as are the two men themselves. The powerful Ornellaia ($35 for the current release, 1988) is a Cabernet Sauvignon-based wine that challenges Bordeaux and California for intense flavors. Winemaker Tibor Gal has made a wine that’s dense, peppery and tarragon-scented and should be aged at least five more years to permit its tannins to subside.

Ornellaia is a red of extraordinary high quality, but it is not well known in the United States. It was first produced in 1984 and is thus new in the vino da tavola game. And it’s expensive.

Lodovico and Gal also make a fine Sauvignon Blanc-based wine, Poggio alla Gazze ($15). It is a flavorful yet delicate wine that rivals the wines of Baron Patrick de Ladoucette of France, after which it is patterned.

The brothers market their wines in the United States through different marketing companies, so they are rarely together in public. But when you do see them together, it’s clear that what distinguishes the two is more than the fact that Piero is a couple of inches taller.

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