In the early eighteenth century, Tuscans undertook the first major export of their region’s wine to England and issued legislation demarcating and protecting the borders of now famous wine zones like Chianti. Despite being one of the earliest chapters of Tuscan wine’s success as a product consumed and prized around the world, little is known about these events, specifically in regard to what motivated Tuscans to start exporting their wine and to introduce laws protecting its production. This dissertation sheds light on these lacunae with a dual-pronged approach of using archival documents to piece together the events and ideas surrounding Tuscany’s first foray in exporting its wine and examining the long tradition of agricultural writing on the Italian peninsula that goes back to antiquity to understand how early modern Tuscans thought about the value and potential of their region’s wine. These texts show that starting in the late sixteenth century, Tuscan agricultural authors emphasized the medical and social benefits of not only drinking good wine but also making it oneself, and in the following century, the next generation of Tuscan scholars, officials, and vignerons elaborated on these ideas by exploring the cultural and commercial advantages that sharing their wines with those beyond Tuscany’s borders could bring to them as individuals and the region as a whole. Letters from the early-eighteenth-century Ricasoli, one of the Tuscan families that exported their wine, illustrate that these same ideas guided Tuscans’ commercial activities. Although the English market for Tuscan wine collapsed in 1716, the firm belief in the potential of Tuscan wine that took shape centuries earlier motivated later Tuscans like Bettino Ricasoli, the nineteenth-century founder of the formula for modern Chianti, to continue searching for ways to use Tuscany’s wine to garner both profit and prestige abroad. This narrative not only demonstrates how early modern ideas about wine shaped the Chianti we now enjoy today but also provides an opportunity to reconsider the cultural, intellectual, and economic vitality of Tuscany during the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, a period which has long been considered one of decline.