Decay and high finance
The consequences of the fall of the Roman Empire were demonstrated most dramatically in Italy itself. The collapse of centralized political control, only gradually replaced by the Catholic Church, created a power vacuum in the country. Time and again, foreign peoples were able to invade Rome was conquered by the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, and in 455 by the Vandals, and large area of the country were devastated and plundered. Moreover, the established economic and their role. Although viticulture did not disappear completely from the lives of the Italians, it went from being a flourishing branch of the national economy to a purely subsistence farming activity for people living in rural area.
Not until the development of the coastal cities of Genoa and Venice, which profited from the Crusades, and the emergence of Florence as a European capital of finance in the 13th and 14th centuries, did the wine trade began to revive. It was in Florence of this period that some of today’s most renowned Italian wine producers first began making a name for themselves, including the Antinoris and the Frescobaldis. These families had both made their fortunes in other fields or in the financial trade between the Vatican and England, but their experience and contacts convinced them that there was money to be made from wine.
Their trade was not primarily concerned with Tuscan wines, however, but rater, and particularly in the case of the Frescobaldis, with the wines from dynamically evolving French Bordeaux region, which found great favor at the royal court in England.
Even so, viticulture in the financiers Tuscan homeland was not entirely unaffected. Although it was to be centuries before the Italian wine industry recovered and subsequently surpassed its former glory, wine both for everyday drinking and for trade, gradually became a more profitable agricultural commodity again, aided by the practice of sharecropping.