Mapping the Orcia DOC: the wine consortium's vineyard map

A map to tell the story of a wine territory

The Consorzio del Vino Orcia commissioned me to map the whole area of the denomination: a single document showing the territory, the DOC boundary and the vineyards of all its members together. Not a technical map for specialists, but a way to tell a story — something that a person who has never heard of Orcia could look at and understand at a glance where this wine comes from.

The work was carried out under measure SRG10 "Promotion of quality products" of the Tuscany rural development programme 2023-2027, co-funded by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development.

The Orcia DOC territory

The denomination covers a wider area than most people imagine, and it sits between the Brunello di Montalcino zone and the Nobile di Montepulciano one. From its northern edge around Buonconvento and Trequanda, the map runs down through San Quirico d'Orcia, Pienza and Castiglione d'Orcia, reaches the slopes of Monte Amiata and Radicofani in the south, and stretches east as far as San Casciano dei Bagni.

The production rules list twelve municipalities. Six of them belong to the denomination in full: Buonconvento, Castiglione d'Orcia, Pienza, Radicofani, San Quirico d'Orcia and Trequanda. Six more belong only in part: Abbadia San Salvatore, Chianciano Terme, Montalcino, San Casciano dei Bagni, Sarteano and Torrita di Siena.

This asymmetry has a direct effect on the map: the DOC boundary does not follow the municipal borders, and in six cases it cuts straight through them. That is why the map shows both lines, told apart by weight and colour — the reader has to be able to see where a municipality ends and where the denomination ends, because they are not the same thing.

It is an area of very different landscapes: the clay hills and badlands of the Val d'Orcia, the arable land of the flatter ground towards the Valdichiana, the woods climbing up Monte Amiata. Showing all of them on the same map, with the same logic, was the starting point for every choice that followed.

The print scale is 1:50,000, in oblique orthographic projection — the same one I use for my mountain maps.

Relief: hills, not mountains

This is the main difference from the work I usually do. In the Alps the relief tells its own story: a few hundred metres of height are enough for a rock face or a glacier to stand out clearly. In the Val d'Orcia the differences in height are a few dozen metres, and a hillshade set up as if for mountains would give back a flat, silent surface.

I started from the high-resolution digital terrain model of Regione Toscana, and built the relief in Blender with the same workflow I use for all my maps. What made the difference was mainly the angle of the light: by lowering the sun, the smallest undulations of the countryside cast shadows long enough to make the shape of the ground readable. Vertical exaggeration stayed low, close to the real elevations: pushing it higher would have turned these clay hills into something they are not.

It is a question of restraint more than of technique. Faced with gentle relief, the temptation is to force it and make it look dramatic. But a map that exaggerates the land is telling a lie, and anyone who knows that land notices straight away.

The data

The map brings together several sources:

• Digital terrain model — Regione Toscana, high resolution
• Land cover — Regione Toscana, reclassified into woodland, scrub/olive grove/vineyard, grassland/arable land
• Members' vineyards — supplied by the Consorzio, produced by ARTEA, the Tuscan regional agency for agricultural payments
• Place names and roads — OpenStreetMap and the Italian Military Geographic Institute

Reclassifying the land cover was a choice about readability, not a limit of the data: the original classes are many more, but on a map meant for communication three categories are enough to give the character of the landscape without turning it into an unreadable mosaic.

Where the work really went: the design

To be honest, the technical part was not the hardest one. The time went into the overall design — and it seems fair to say so, because that is the part of this craft that usually stays invisible.

The starting problem was one of hierarchy. A map like this has to say one thing before all the others: here are the members' vineyards. Everything else — relief, woods, villages, farmsteads, roads — is there to give context, but must not compete.

The solution was to take saturation away from everything else. The greens of woodland and crops are muted, the arable land shifts towards a warm ivory, and the whole map lives in a soft range that recalls old topographic maps. Against that background, the members' vineyards are the only truly saturated element: a deep red, which is also the colour of the wine the map is about. It is the first thing the eye finds, and that is no accident.

The same deep red comes back as a line, for the DOC boundary. The two marks are linked by colour, and this links the vineyard of each single member to the perimeter of the denomination it belongs to. The municipal borders run in the same register but thinner and lighter: there for those who look for them, invisible to those who do not.

The thirty members are shown with numbered markers, white on deep red, keyed to a list in the legend. Numbering instead of writing the names on the map was a necessity: thirty extra labels, in an area already crowded with farmsteads and small places, would have destroyed readability.

Because the place names here are as dense as on an alpine map, but of a different kind: not peaks and passes, but a very fine fabric of farmsteads, parish churches, scattered houses and farms, which is the real signature of the Tuscan landscape. Giving them up would have meant losing the character of the place; keeping them all meant handling them on three distinct levels — main towns, minor places, water features — each with its own weight, size and colour.

Where it has been used

The map was presented by the Consorzio at Vinitaly 2026.

Commissioned work

Projects like this one are the least visible part of my work, but they take up most of my time. I make cartography on commission for public bodies, consortia, publishers and companies: maps for print, interactive maps for the web, automated production systems, and consulting on geographic data and map design.

If you have a place to map, here are the services I offer — or write to me directly.