Wine · Terminology
Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT)
Italy's PGI tier — flexible, regional, and the home of the Super Tuscans.
Indicazione Geografica Tipica — IGT — is Italy's PGI tier, created in 1992 by the Goria Law and sitting below DOC and DOCG.
It was invented to solve an embarrassment. By the 1980s some of Italy's most admired and expensive wines — Sassicaia, Tignanello, Ornellaia — were legally vino da tavola, table wine, because they used Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in places where the DOC rules demanded Sangiovese. IGT gave them a respectable category, and the Super Tuscan phenomenon its name.
In practice
- 85% of grapes from the named area; wide variety list; generous yields.
- Areas are large — Toscana IGT, Veneto IGT, Terre Siciliane IGT.
- Some famous IGT wines have since been given their own DOC (Bolgheri), but many stayed put deliberately.
- Also written IGP on modern labels, since the EU harmonisation.
Where you'll meet it
The Italian pyramid
| Tier | EU category | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| DOCG | PDO | Strictest; ~77 zones; government seal on the neck |
| DOC | PDO | ~330 zones; the mainstream quality tier |
| IGT | PGI | ~120 zones; flexible, varietal-friendly |
| Vino da Tavola | Wine | No region, no vintage on the label |
Why IGT stayed prestigious
Ordinarily a lower tier means a lesser wine. IGT broke that assumption, for a simple reason: the wines that defined it were better and more expensive than the appellation wines around them. Once the market learned that the label tier did not predict quality in Italy, IGT became a legitimate choice rather than a fallback.
The lesson generalises. Appellation rules encode a region's tradition; where the tradition is out of step with what the land can do, the interesting wines appear one tier down.