The DOC and DOCG System — The Only Order a Country Like This Could Manage

Every law is born from a wish to impose order on something that is, by nature, disorderly. Over six decades, Italy tried to do exactly that with its wine. The result was not the French system translated into Italian. It became something else entirely — more complex, more contradictory, and, in the end, more faithful to the country that wrote it.

No law can contain, in one stroke, a territory that never had a centre. But Italy tried, and tried seriously. It is worth understanding how.

In this chapter, I trace the construction of the DOC and DOCG pyramid — from the first attempts at order in the 1960s to the contradictions that still run through it today. Because this is not a story about bureaucracy. It is a story about what happens when a country tries to impose a grammar on something that has always spoken in dialects.

1963 — A Pyramid Copied from Abroad

Italy’s first serious attempt to regulate wine origin arrived late and timidly. In 1930, a regulation created three vague categories of “typical” wine — special, superior and fine — with no real territorial criterion. It took more than three decades for something with real substance to follow.

Presidential Decree No. 930 of 1963 is the founding document. Closely inspired by the French model of the Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée, created almost thirty years earlier, it established a three-tier hierarchy: the simple Denomination of Origin, the Controlled Denomination of Origin (DOC), and, at the top, the Controlled and Guaranteed Denomination of Origin (DOCG). For the first time, an Italian law required a set of production specifications, a register of production areas, and controls on declared grape quantities.

The architecture was French. What got built inside it was, from day one, something else.

The First DOC and the First DOCG

The 1963 law created the pyramid, but it took three years to produce its first concrete result. On 6 May 1966, Vernaccia di San Gimignano became the first Italian wine to receive DOC status. In the days following its publication in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, other historic denominations followed — Est! Est!! Est!!! di Montefiascone, Ischia, Frascati — in a kind of inaugural rush that says a great deal about the hurry to legitimise names already established by use.

The top of the pyramid took even longer to find an occupant. DOCG status was only awarded in full in 1980, and the first wine to receive it was Brunello di Montalcino — a recognition that crowned decades of work by the Biondi-Santi family and other Montalcino producers in building a reputation the law would merely confirm. The law, here as almost everywhere else, arrived after the prestige, not before it.

Two Reforms, the Same Pyramid

In the years that followed, the number of denominations multiplied so quickly that the industry itself began asking for a review. Law No. 164, of 10 February 1992, answered that pressure. It kept the 1963 structure in place but added a fourth, wider and more flexible tier beneath the DOC — the Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT) — and introduced mandatory physical-chemical analysis before a wine could go to market. This is the law that gave the Italian pyramid the shape we still recognise today.

The second major reform was not born in Rome, but in Brussels. EU Regulation No. 479/2008 simplified the legal framework for wine across the European Union, aligning it with the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) system already used for other agricultural products. After 2008, formally, only two categories of wine exist in Europe: with a geographical indication, or without one. Italy nonetheless managed to keep its historic acronyms — DOCG, DOC, IGT — running in parallel with the European ones, in a solution that spared the country the trouble of explaining to anyone who already knew them what Barolo or Brunello meant.

The pyramid, then, survived two reforms. Today, according to figures compiled by Federdoc in 2024, Italy has 77 DOCG, 330 DOC and 118 IGT denominations — 525 in a single country, more than any other wine nation in the world.

The Little Strip That Separates Less Than It Seems

Between a DOC and a DOCG, the law draws a line that, in practice, is narrower than the name suggests. Both require a set of production specifications and a tasting panel, made up mostly of winemakers and oenologists, that evaluates every batch before it reaches the market. The visible difference comes down to a small paper strip sealed across the neck of the bottle — the fascetta. For DOCG, that strip is numbered and mandatory, issued and controlled by the state. For DOC, it may exist, but it is optional.

That is not much, for a distinction that in the consumer’s imagination separates two different worlds. And this is exactly where the system’s most recurring criticism is born: tasting panels, made up of a fairly specific technical profile, sometimes reject wines the international press has already praised — only to approve the very same wine, unchanged, on a second submission. This is not a problem of badly written rules. It is a problem of the people applying them judging wine against a particular ideal of style that does not always match the market’s taste, or the taste of the very territory the denomination is supposed to protect.

The Paradox of Sassicaia

No episode illustrates the gap between law and quality better than the legal story of Sassicaia.

When the Incisa della Rocchetta family began bottling Sassicaia, in Bolgheri, they used Cabernet Sauvignon — a grape outside the region’s rules. The law had no category for what was in the glass. The wine was born, by legal obligation, as Vino da Tavola: the lowest tier of the pyramid, shared with the simplest, most anonymous wine from any Italian cellar. It later moved up to Indicazione Geografica Tipica, still without a denomination of its own.

The contradiction lasted until 1994, when Sassicaia became a subzone of the Bolgheri DOC, under the name “Bolgheri Sassicaia.” In 2013, the denomination gained full independence, becoming the only DOC in all of Italy reserved for a single producer — Tenuta San Guido, and no one else.

For nearly three decades, then, one of the most expensive and sought-after wines in the world shared a legal category with the cheapest table wine on any Italian supermarket shelf. The law was not measuring quality. It was measuring compliance with an agronomic rule that the wine’s own success had made obsolete.

When Freedom Is Worth More Than the Seal

If Sassicaia shows a producer forced by law to climb from the bottom of the pyramid to the top, there is today an inverse, voluntary movement that may say even more about the state of the system.

A growing number of producers — small, artisanal, often among the most respected within their own denominations — choose to give up the DOC or DOCG they are entitled to, and sell their wine simply as “Vino,” with no geographical indication at all. It happens in Franciacorta. It happens on Etna itself, where Frank Cornelissen — whom I already mentioned in the previous chapter — bottles part of his production outside the denomination, precisely so as not to submit his deliberately minimal, unpredictable style of winemaking to the judgment of a tasting panel built for a different kind of wine.

It is an uncomfortable reversal of the pyramid’s original purpose. It was created to give the consumer a guarantee that the producer’s name, on its own, did not always offer. Today, for a growing number of prestigious producers, it is the producer’s name that has become the guarantee — and the denomination, the weight they would rather shed. That favours those who have already built enough reputation to sell without a seal. It does not favour the small, anonymous producer who still needs the denomination to be found at all.

The Winemaker Before the Italian System

I look at the DOC and DOCG pyramid with the respect of someone who knows how much it costs to write any law about a subject as alive as wine — and with the critical distance of someone who has already seen, in Portugal, the same tensions between rule and quality, between protection and rigidity.

The Italian system is not a failure. It protected names, disciplined boundaries, gave the consumer a minimum of trust where before there was only a label and a promise. But its imperfection is also instructive: no law replaces the decades of work it takes a producer to prove, bottle after bottle, that their name is worth more than any seal the state can stick on the neck of the bottle.

Perhaps this is the most honest lesson Italy has to offer any wine country, Portugal included: regulating origin is necessary, but it is never enough. The denomination opens the door. Who builds trust once inside it is always the producer, never the law.

From the only order a country like this could manage, the next stage of this journey returns to the table — the place where, more than any regulation, it is decided whether an Italian wine actually makes sense.