Giacomo Tachis passed away

We have just learned that Giacomo Tachis, one of Italy's greatest winemakers, passed away at the age of 82. He created some of the most famous Italian wines of the last 40 years including Sassicaia, Tignanello, Solaia and Cervaro della Sala as well as San Leonardo, Turriga, Saffredi and others.

We would like to remember him with a story written by Daniele Cernilli some years ago.

Giacomino ‘The Wine-Blender’

When I first met Giacomo Tachis, in 1982, the first thing he to me said was: ‘’I am not an enologist, I’m a wine blender’. I was quite in awe of him, considered him to be a true ‘master’ and out of respect addressed him as ‘Doctor Tachis’,  due to the fact he held degrees in enology and chemistry. He immediately corrected me and insisted that, first, we be on a first name basis and, second, that he did not consider himself an enologist. With time I understood that Giacomo was above all an intellectual and a humanist. He has his own library of old texts on wine that any wine scholar would die for. But then again, perhaps he was the ultimate wine scholar.  Like all people with a great personality he could be difficult. He could not stand people who were full of themselves, above all producers and those enologists who he thought were showoffs and seemed more interested in being a ‘celebrity’. Of course, he was not exactly a wallflower himself and he loved to take the stage and speak in public. However, he always did this is a reserved way and was never outspoken. Once during a conference in Campania I found myself in a debate with him and Gino Veronelli. At a certain point Giacomo spoke, after Veronelli had made some very qualified and slightly elaborate remarks, and said: ‘’I always love listening to Veronelli.  He speaks so well so well it is almost like listening to music and he is an instrument, a trombone’’. You could hear a pin drop it was so quite in the room. Veronelli was not at all pleased but held his tongue, while I tried to bring the discussion back to the topic of the debate. But the milk was spilt. They were anything but friends and bone of contention between them was who had the original idea for Sassicaia. Veronelli, with good reason, claimed he was the one who convinced Mario Incisa della Rocchetta to make a wine that would sell on the international market. Tachis, on the other hand, insisted that he was the one who actually created the wine and would not accept that anyone would not recognize this. For him it was not a question of ambition or ego but of principle. There was no way these two men would ever agree.

Giacomino was a real pro at giving little jabs. Once when a famous and ambitious colleague of his asked his opinion on the level of acidity of a certain wine, he replied: ‘’What? Didn’t you bring that little pad of litmus paper you always carry in your pocket?’’. The fact is that almost all of Italy’s great wines have his signature on them: Sassicaia, Tignanello, Solaia, Cervaro della Sala, Turriga, Saffredi, San Leonardo, along with the wines of Castello dei Rampolla, Castell’in Villa, Cantina di Santadi, Abbazia di Sant’Anastasia, Donnafugata and Argiano. Then there are the countless ones he ‘tweaked’ for friends. When I would remind him of this he almost brushed it off as a trifle but I knew he was pleased. What is important is that Piero Antinori believed in him and allowed him to study under Emile Peynaud at the University of Bordeaux and to run, until he retired in 1993 at the age of only 60, one of the most prestigious wineries in Italy. Allow me to share an anecdote I have never told anyone, more or less. Back in August 1988 I asked him if we could meet for an interview to be published in Gambero Rosso. ‘’Come up on Saturday,’’ he told me, ‘’I live right across from the Antinori winery. I’ve got a little chore I have to do in the morning and you can keep me company and we’ll chat. No one is ever there on Saturdays and so we won’t be bothered’’. The ‘’little chore’’ was that of blending Tignanello, choosing which out of the some 400 barriques, about half of them, were good enough to make the wine. It was a tremendous and very delicate task that he performed with a speed and precision that few others in the world would be able to match. Not only that, he also got me involved, for didactic purposes, and I learned more about wine in those three or four hours with him than I have in my whole life. At the same time he answered my questions and I went away happy, a little tipsy, with the interview in my pocket. During all this we also took a two-hour lunch break and he brought me to a small country restaurant where we had a simple meal under a pergola. At the table he only drank orangeade and confessed to me: ‘’It’s what I like to drink more than anything else in the world, even more than wine”. I guess that after all the tastings he had to do for work, wine was the last thing he wanted to drink.

Giacomo has not been well for the past couple of years, he rarely goes out in public and does not speak often. I miss his quips, those like: ‘’Everyone talks about Sangiovese and, for sure, it is a great grape, especially when it get a little help from Cabernet’’ or ‘’If the sun is not good for grapes, just imagine what the rain does’’. This latter one was in response to those who criticized his beloved island wines, the ones from Sardinia and Sicily. Giacomo was from Chieri, near Turin, and speaks with a precise Piedmont accent but in his later years he rediscovered his family’s roots. As the late former Italian president Francesco Cossiga, a wine expert himself, once explained to me: ‘’If someone is named Tachis, they may claim they are from Piedmont, but it would be hard to find a surname that is more Sardinian than that’’.