In 1966, Marchese Piero Antinori had just become the 25th generation of his family to make wine, taking over the Tuscan business from his father, Niccolo Antinori. At the time, much of the wine produced in Tuscany was simple and inexpensive, but the 28-year-old winemaker craved wine that had the complexity of France's great Bordeaux vintages. He wasn't alone.

"Consumers were starting to get tired of the traditional wines," he said. "They wanted to enjoy something different, more elegant and sophisticated."

So, Antinori began growing French grapes in his Italian vineyards, adding them to his traditional blends, and experimenting with different types of barrels. Today this would hardly be noteworthy—winemakers use a bewildering variety of grapes and high-tech techniques—but at the time, it was revolutionary.

It also helped launch a style of wine that can now be found in top collections and on five-star wine lists, next to bottles of Château Lafite, Château Margaux, Opus One, and Screaming Eagle. Forty years ago, the idea that collectors might pay a premium for Tuscan wine would have seemed as laughable as paying Bordeaux prices for California cabs. Neither wine region, of course, is a laughingstock anymore, and Super Tuscans command super prices. The current vintage of Antinori's top-of-the-line Tuscan, Solaia, has a suggested retail price of $285 a bottle and in some big Italian wine markets, like New York and Los Angeles, it can be marked up to $350.

Auctions of high-end wines, the drink of choice for Wall Street, have been affected by the global financial crisis. But, while some Bordeaux prices have been slashed, according to Peter Meltzer, a wine-auction expert and author of Keys to the Cellar: Strategies and Secrets of Wine Collecting, "Super Tuscans haven't been heavily hit." In fact, at the top end, many of the wines have even gone up in price. There "hasn't been a flight from Super Tuscans," he says.

Tuscany obviously wasn't always a favorite of wine collectors. Up until the late 1960s, much of the wine the region produced was either sold in bulk, used to make cheap table wines, or went into Chianti, which was exported. There wasn't really a market for wines from Tuscany that weren't called Chianti, and most winemakers couldn't afford to produce anything else. "The only market was Chianti," said Sergio Esposito, co-owner of New York City's Italian Wine Merchants and author of the new memoir Passion on the Vine.

But among the rows of traditional grape varieties was a smattering of French vines. "My father started in the 1930s to blend small quantities of cabernet with sangiovese with very good results," Antinori said. The family's cousin Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta went even further, planting cabernet and cabernet franc on his estate, and making wines with the grapes. After working for more than two decades on the wine, he released just a few thousand bottles of the 1968 vintage, which he called Sassicaia ("stony ground"). The world would come to know it as the first Super Tuscan.