Our latest assignment at the Ladies Tasting Society is to blind-taste a selection of wines from Italy that are pure sangiovese — that is, 100 percent, virgin sangiovese, the native (and woefully underappreciated) grape variety of Tuscany. It’s as if sangiovese were the first love and first wife of Tuscan winemakers, to whom she bore scads of beautiful children, including molti Chianti. But then this productive, if sometimes cranky, grape found herself neglected when her feckless lover started looking around for something sexier, more multilingual, and more marketable — namely cabernet sauvignon and merlot.

The end result is the “Super-Tuscan,” the celebrated, if sometimes not particularly Italian, red wine that makes a big thing out of using every grape but sangiovese. Worse, a side effect of the invasion of cabernet and merlot into Tuscany is the recent — and so quintessentially European — brouhaha over local winemakers who are allegedly blending non-native grapes into wines that are, according to the laws that still regulate most Old World wine production, supposed to be pure sangiovese.

The most famous flash-point in this controversy is a town called Montalcino, about an hour’s drive south of Florence, which has been making a wine called Brunello that’s 100 percent sangiovese since forever. Stay tuned for more on “Brunellogate,” plus my tasting notes on a great Brunello and the results of the Ladies’ blind tasting.