The Museum Vine and Wine , opened in 1999 in some areas of the Town Hall, has as main purpose to enhance the quality of wine produced in Carmignano tracing its history, techniques and production tools, from Etruscan and Roman to medieval times – when the advent of sharecropping changed the way we produce wine – up to the present day and the current wine production of high quality.
It is worthwhile noting that in 1716 Cosimo III de ‘Medici published the product specification which was born the first “appellation of origin” on the Chianti, which followed immediately after that of “Carmignano.” This wine, which in 1975 obtained the d.o.c. in 1990 and the DOCG, today is a selected product that comes in limited quantities from different farms scattered in an area not large, represented by a few windows in the museum.
The museum also contains reproductions of paintings (two works by Bartolomeo Bimbi preserved in the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano), documents (such as exile of Cosimo III), movies, photographs (like those taken from ‘Swiss ethnologist Paul Scheurmeier) and locations media that allow you to do research on the topic, with a CD illustrating the techniques of wine production and, more generally, its journey from the countryside (grape growing, harvesting, crushing, etc. ..) to the wine cellar (storage, bottling, etc. ..).
The last room of the museum houses a collection of over 800 bottles of wine (some even a century old) belonged to Federico Melis, economic historian, and collected during his travels in Italy and Europe.
We could not miss a mention of the other typical products of the territory, also derived from the cultivation of land and labor of man: dried figs and olive oil.
