Why is there a black rooster on a wine bottle.

Let me tell you a story, a legend.

At the time of the medieval struggles, Florence and Siena, always at war for the possession of this precious corner of Tuscany and both tired of bloody battles, decided to settle the matter with a singular arbitration.

The two cities decided to entrust the definition of the border to a test between two knights, one with the colors of Florence and one with the colors of Siena. . The Florentine-Sienese border would be fixed at the point where the two knights had met starting at dawn from their respective cities, to the song of the rooster.

Photo by Ricardo Ortiz on Pexels.com

The Senesi chose a white rooster and peppered it with food, convinced that at dawn this would sing louder, while the Florentines chose a black rooster that they did not feed very much.

 On the day of the rehearsal, the black Florentine rooster, bitten by hunger, began to sing before the sun had even risen, while the white one, Sienese, was still sleeping blessed because he was still satiated.

 The Florentine rider, at the agreed signal, immediately galloped, while his Sienese colleague had to wait much longer before the other bird decided to sing: the result of the peaceful tenzone was that the two knights met only 12 km from the walls of Siena and so the Florentine Republic could annex all Chianti.

The Black Rooster was used as a symbol of the Chianti League, a sort of military jurisdiction created by the Republic in 1384 in anti-Senese function, comprising the current municipalities of Castellina in Chianti, Gaiole in Chianti and Radda in Chianti.

As at the beginning of the XVII cen. the wine produced in this area was already  appreciated , even abroad,in 1716 the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo III issued a notice that the wines produced in Castellina, Gaiole and Radda could be called Chianti wines, thus delimiting the Chianti wine area to include about 3/5 of the Municipality of Greve

And so the Black rooster symbol passed to the wine,of which we’ll talk another time.

Anyway now you know why travelling in Chianti you can see many black rooster represented here and there,so many you can even organize a photo hunting and you  know that a  bottle is a Chianti Classico Wine when you  see the black rooster on it.