Vino Nobile di Montepulciano was the first Italian wine ever awarded DOCG status, in 1980 — ahead of Barolo, ahead of Brunello. The town that gives it its name sits at 605 metres on a narrow tufa ridge in the Province of Siena, long and thin, shaped by the geology beneath it rather than by any planner. A montepulciano wine tour from florence covers roughly 115 kilometres of the Via Cassia and the Val di Chiana before that ridge appears. The settlement is Etruscan in origin. Rome absorbed it; the Middle Ages fortified it. In 1511 it passed permanently to Florence, and the Medici sent architects south. Antonio da Sangallo the Elder gave the town its Renaissance grammar — travertine façades, rusticated bases, a discipline imposed on medieval stone. His Tempio di San Biagio, begun in 1518, stands alone below the walls in a field of cypress, a Greek cross in honey-coloured travertine that took twentyticks of years to complete and remains among the purest High Renaissance churches in Tuscany. Piazza Grande crowns the ridge. The Palazzo Comunale, remodelled by Michelozzo in the fifteenth century, deliberately echoes Florence's Palazzo Vecchio — a civic quotation, and a political one. Opposite stands the unfinished brick face of the Duomo, its façade never clad, sheltering Taddeo di Bartolo's Assumption triptych of 1401. The town's tourist office occupies Piazza Don Minzoni, 1, and entry to the historic centre itself costs 0 EUR. Beneath all of it runs the second town. Cellars cut into the tufa descend three and four levels below the shopfronts, some connecting Etruscan burial chambers to Renaissance vaulting. Here Sangiovese — known locally as Prugnolo Gentile — ages in oak for a minimum of twenty-four months before it may be called Nobile. The DOCG zone covers roughly 1,300 hectares, a small figure by any comparison. What draws travellers on a Tuscan winery tour is the compression of it: Etruscan tomb, Renaissance temple, working cantina, and a view across the Val d'Orcia to Monte Amiata, all within a few hundred metres. Val d'Orcia entered the UNESCO list in 2004. Chianti lies on the road between. A montepulciano wine tour from florence is, in practice, a transect through a thousand years of Tuscan agriculture and ambition.