A small museum where the protagonist is wine and where wine then becomes a pretext to tell about the people who live and have lived in Carmignano, their history and culture, sharecropping and a peasant civilization that has now disappeared. Inside, in the evening, courses and tasting evenings are organized.The Museum, currently closed to the public for renovation, offers a dive into the past to retrace the production techniques and the history of wine made above all by the people who allowed this miracle . The rooms follow one another in part of what were the Niccolini cellars, from where at the beginning of the last century copious loads of wine left for Switzerland, Germany and even overseas. The Pro loco of Carmignano manages the museum, owned by the municipal administration. In the hall there are ancient agricultural tools, but also a lot of information resulting from archival research. Carmignano is after all a land of ancient winemaking traditions. Thanks to a Grand Ducal announcement of 1716 by a Medici. Cosimo III, is among the oldest Doc ante litteram in Europe. Perhaps the oldest. On the walls there are the citations that illustrious and less illustrious writers, painters and poets have made of this wine over the centuries. There is no shortage of curiosities - on display there is the Melis collection, eight hundred bottles from all over the world, even a century old - and in the studio there are multimedia stations where you can start another journey, this time virtual.
A flasks-filler from the Niccolini Cellars (1890-1900)
This symbolic object marks the beginning of Carmignano’s large-scale wine production and the consequent improvement in the town’s agricultural economy. This development was owed to Ippolito Niccolini* who, inspired by a strong work ethic, took over the Carmignano farm belonging to his maternal grandparents. His first step to modernize the farm was based on two fundamental observations. On the one hand, it was necessary to deal with the social issue of the peasant condition by providing new tools and social safety nets. On the other, the focus had to be on the production of quality wine for the export market.
Thanks to Marchese Niccolini’s innovative and, shall we say, revolutionary ideas, work at the Niccolini Cellars in the late nineteenth century was organized as an industry, of which this beautiful flask-filler is a noteworthy example.
* Ippolito Niccolini (1848-1919), marchese, a prominent figure in Tuscan and Italian economics and politics at the turn of the 20th century.
Museum of Grapes and Wine local tourist office site link
Currently closed to the public
