While today the wines they produce are a $1.5 billion industry, it was not long ago — even as late as the 1960s — that the families who lived here were mostly sharecroppers or subsistence farmers. Over the years, wine production became the most valuable agricultural activity, and many of the farmers who did not migrate to the cities, unlike so many others, stayed because of the business.

Fabrizio Bindocci, 59, president of the consortium of Brunello producers, is old enough to remember when the region was impoverished, and he insists that it is in the interest of the growers to preserve the land.

“We have vineyards with olive trees in between, we have a channel for the water at the bottom of every slope, we breed cows and clean up the countryside,” said Mr. Bindocci, general director of Il Poggione, a vineyard that has belonged to the same family since the 1890s. “We care because we live off of this. This place is our identity.”

Enrico Rossi, 56, president of the Tuscany region, said that he, too, could remember the old days, but added that his government had no intention of restoring an ancient Tuscan landscape. The goal, he explained, was to safeguard the region’s heritage and enhance its sustainability and to better define the national laws on landscape protection, some dating back to the 1920s.

Tuscany is one of the first regions in Italy to have a database of protected areas with clear borders and regulations. Those rules used to be so vague that they spawned a tangle of interpretations and paradoxical enforcement at the provincial or municipal level, like allowing villas to be built on otherwise undisturbed beaches, while requiring the owner of a warehouse, in one notorious case, to apply for special approval to create an indoor window.

“We are applying and simplifying the national laws that already existed,” Mr. Rossi said. “This is transparency. It’s a clarification, not a restriction or a vexation.”