Brother Pietro is a fairly contemporary-looking monk, preferring blue jeans, a band-collared shirt, and Birkenstock sandals to the more traditional vestments. He is the head man at the Convento dell’Annunciata, a sixteenth-century abbey in the commune of Rovato, in the gently rolling hills between Bergamo and Brescia in central Lombardy. Rovato lies within the Franciacorta wine zone, and the Convento dell’ Annunciata is one of a number of historic monasteries in the region. Brother Pietro and the handful of others who live in the cloister spend their days studying and praying among Romanino frescoes, or gazing out from their perch atop Monte Orfano at the broad expanse of the Padana plain to the south. Their principal source of income, other than church donations, comes from the vineyards that tumble down the hillside below the abbey. They don’t cultivate the vines themselves but instead lease them to the Bellavista winery in nearby Erbusco, which is owned by construction titan Vittorio Moretti.
“There have been vineyards here for centuries,” says Brother Pietro, his voice a smoke-cured growl. On a tour of the abbey, he pads softly and slowly through the labyrinthine halls, leading the way down to the old wine cellar, first excavated in the sixteenth century. “After the fall of the Roman Empire, it was the monasteries that kept the culture of the vine alive,” he continues. These days, though, he and his monastic brethren are nonfactors in a wine economy that has changed dramatically.
Brother Pietro and Vittorio Moretti are an unlikely pair, one that embodies the melding of Old and New Worlds in Italian wine country. When touring the verdant vineyards of Italy, it’s easy to forget that the owner of the big tenuta on the hill might well be a dentist from Switzerland, or that the proprietor of the little podere around the corner is a cement contractor, not a sharecropper. And perhaps nowhere does the reality of Italian wine collide with the fantasy of Italian wine quite like in Franciacorta, where the rural idyll has been transformed into suburban bliss. Or resort-town chic.
It’s not that Franciacorta doesn’t have history. The name is said to have first appeared in 1277, in the statutes of the municipality of Brescia. It was spelled Franzacurta (from the Latin franchae curtes) and denoted a district of monasteries that was exempt from taxation. The Convento dell’Annunziata and the many other abbeys in the zone harken back to this time, but they’re surrounded by ultramodern, conference-style hotels, a golf course, and well-manicured lake towns such as Sárnico and Iseo, which seem custom-designed for tourism. A few miles east of the Convento, in the commune of Castegnato, is a shopping mall built to resemble a medieval castle. Its parking lot stretches for acres.
“There isn’t anything like Franciacorta anywhere in Italy,” says Mattia Vezzola, the longtime enologist at Bellavista. As he says this, he leans intently over the mahogany bar in the Bellavista tasting room, which is lavishly decorated with leather couches and modern art. “Franciacorta as we know it today is a very recent phenomenon.”
The Franciacorta of today is a wine zone famed for its méthode champenoise sparkling wines, made mostly from chardonnay and pinot noir in some of the biggest, sleekest, and most expensively appointed wineries in Italy. A good number of the producers are wealthy industrialists like Moretti, many of whom are from nearby Brescia. But what’s most notable is how fast they built their properties: Nearly all of them arrived in the last two decades, turning what was once a sleepy collection of farmhouses and weekend getaways into a coterie of commercial wine powerhouses.
Although it is likely that the old-time monks of Franciacorta experimented with sparkling wines, in the past the region was really known only for rustic reds. It wasn’t until the sixties that spumante production began in earnest, when a local enologist named Franco Ziliani, while working for the Guido Berlucchi estate (one of maybe five commercial wineries in the zone at the time), decided to try his hand at Champagne-style sparklers from some of Berlucchi’s pinot noir grapes.
“Ziliani had a laboratory in Brescia, and he felt that there was potential for sparkling wine in this zone,” Vezzola explains. “From there it skyrocketed, because the seventies were a time of explosive economic growth in this region, especially Brescia. And it so happened that right when Ziliani made his discovery, there was plenty of money here to fuel more experiments.”
Not only did the Berlucchi winery grow into a 5-million-bottle-a-year operation, but new cantine started popping up on every corner. This included Moretti’s Bellavista and Maurizio Zanella’s Ca’ del Bosco, which he started as a well-financed teenager right out of enology school (Zanella’s father was one of Italy’s largest auto-parts manufacturers). “There’s a real entrepreneurial force here in Lombardia,” says Vezzola. “The people of this region have always been great business people. And that has shaped the wine culture in a profound way.”
Brescia was once known principally for metallurgy and arms manufacturing—Beretta firearms are made just outside the city. But these days, the area also has a swanky string of sparkling wine estates, complete with Relais & Châteaux Hotels (Moretti’s L’Albereta, which also houses a Michelin two-star restaurant) and all the other creature comforts. At times Franciacorta feels like an exclusive gated community, which to a certain extent it is.
“To make sparkling wine, you need money, plain and simple,” Vezzola says, citing the need for more expensive equipment and more space in a sparkling-wine cantina than in an average winery. “If you want to be making sparklers you need more room to store the bottles, because they must be rotated and therefore you need to be able to get at them. You also have much more money tied up in inventory than most wineries. It’s an incredible investment.”
This is the reality of modern Italian wine, however much we might like to believe otherwise. The rural idyll is more or less a thing of the past, which, in wine terms, is probably a good thing.
Lombardia has always been the center of big business in Italy, be it silk and textile manufacturing in the Lake Como area, banking in Milan, or mining and metallurgy in Brescia. But its richness is not merely financial. The Padana plain spreads across the bottom third of the region, fed not only by the Po but by a tangle of its tributaries, which flow down from the Alpine lakes. The lowlands of the Padana produce a wealth of rice for risotto and offer one of the largest stretches of pasture in Italy. In fact, few other Italian regions can rival Lombardia’s assortment of cheese, most of which are from cow’s milk: There’s the salty, nutty Grana Padano, the more widely produced sibling of Parmigiano-Reggiano; the pungent, veiny Gorgonzola, named for a small town east of Milan; the soft, funky Robiola; and the sharp, runny Taleggio, a specialty of Alpine towns such as Bergamo and Lecco.
Despite being Italy’s biggest and most populous region, and despite boasting the country’s most high-tech (and most productive) farming industry, Lombardia is not a prodigious wine producer. Only the Oltrepò Pavese, in the southwestern corner of the region, is a significant source of wine, with an annual output that places it among Italy’s most productive DOCs. Traditionally, Oltrepò Pavese has been Milan’s wine reservoir, turning out a mass of light reds and sparkling wines to be vacuumed up in the city’s restaurants. Other than those from the Oltrepò Pavese, Lombard wines are specialty items: For all of the success of Franciacorta sparklers, for example, they still only amount to about one-sixth of the amount of Prosecco produced in Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, in neighboring Veneto.
Stylistically speaking, Lombardia has everything: serious Franciacorta sparklers that most agree are the best in Italy; crisp, aromatic still whites from Lake Garda, which at a minimum stand up to the best of Soave; powerful, aromatic nebbiolo reds on the terraces of the Valtellina, which can rival Barolo in depth and complexity; and a new generation of plump bonardas, fragrant pinot noirs, and méthode champenoise sparklers from the once-unheralded Oltrepò Pavese. Not only is Lombardia rich in natural and financial resources, it makes the most of them.
In one sense, Franciacorta is the Silicon Valley of Italian wine: It’s not only the birthplace of a revolutionary product but of a culture of entrepreneurs. Yet for all of the resources of Franciacorta’s wine producers, there’s something less tangible about the southern shores of Lake Iseo that distinguishes the wines that are made there.
Monte Orfano, where the Convento dell’Annunciata sits, is one of the first points at which the Padana plain, which is nourished by the Po, begins to give way to the Orobie Alps. In fact, the swath of hills that includes Orfano—essentially the southern flank of the Franciacorta DOC—looks almost like a giant bunker when viewed from the south.
“Orfano means orphan in English,” explains Martino De Rosa, the son-in-law of Vittorio Moretti, who helps run both Bellavista and the family’s newer Contadi Castaldi winery. “It’s believed that the Orfano hills were formed by tectonic rather than glacial movement, whereas the area of Franciacorta is a glacial basin. Monte Orfano is like a wall separating Franciacorta from the Padana plain. There’s a different climate and different soils on either side.”
Whereas the soils of the Padana are richer and more fertile mixtures of heavy clays and alluvial deposits, the Franciacorta hills are a silty, pebbly glacial moraine, which DeRosa says helps slow the ripening of grapes. Add to this the moderating effect of Lake Iseo, which makes the winters in Franciacorta slightly warmer and provides cooling breezes in the summer, and the normally fast-ripening chardonnay and pinot noir can slow down a bit—giving them a chance to develop complex aromas and flavors while maintaining acidity. It’s not that simple, of course, but it’s no exaggeration to say Franciacorta has a distinctly cooler climate than much of the area that immediately surrounds it, sitting in its natural amphitheater that looks across the lake to the Alps.
Franciacorta’s sparklers are made from varying percentages of chardonnay, pinot nero (pinot noir), and pinot bianco (blanc), although chardonnay has become the dominant variety in the zone, covering more than two-thirds of the 3,500 acres now planted there. No one in Franciacorta can say for sure when these and other French grapes first arrived in the area, but it is possible that they were introduced by Napoleon, who made Milan the capital of the Cisalpine Republic in 1797; they may well have been there even earlier, possibly in the vineyards of the region’s many monasteries. The point is that while the sparkling wines of Franciacorta may be a recent phenomenon, the grapes they’re made from are not.
“At the end of the nineteenth century, phylloxera destroyed the vineyards of Franciacorta,” says Giovanni Cavalleri, whose eponymous winery in Erbusco is typically mentioned in the same breath as top dogs like Ca’ del Bosco and Bellavista. “Throughout the north, many French varieties were introduced at that time as the vineyards were replanted.” If you look at it that way, then, the so-called French varieties have been here for at least a hundred years.
As for the style of Franciacorta sparklers, they are patterned very closely after their counterparts in France. Franciacorta wines are made only in the traditional Champagne method, in which the secondary fermentation of the wine is carried out in bottle. And Franciacorta producers favor French terminology on their labels—they tend to use rosé instead of rosato, for example, and the designations indicating the residual sugar level in the wines are the same as in France: Extra Brut (the dryest, with less than 6 grams per liter of residual sugar); Brut (less than 15); Extra Dry (12 to 20); Sec (17 to 35); and Demi-Sec (33 to 50). The sweetest designation for French sparklers, Rich or Doux, is not included in the Franciacorta DOCG discipline.
Many producers also have wines labeled as Satèn, indicating that it is made only from white grapes in a crémant style—meaning that the wine has a slightly lower atmospheric pressure than a traditional méthode champenoise sparkler. Another popular style in Franciacorta is Pas Dosé or Pas Operé, which indicates a wine that has not been given a dosage before bottling. Dosage is the mixture of wine and sugar syrup typically added to sparkling wines to balance out their often intense acidity, and is typically a major determinant of sparkling-wine style; Pas Dosé wines are therefore the most bone-dry of the Franciacorta lot.
Yet for whatever reason, wine experts are reluctant to allow Franciacorta wines into the rarefied company of Champagne—there always seems to be some disclaimer attached to any praise of Italian sparklers, however effusive that praise may be. Not only are they made from essentially the same grapes, and produced by the same methods, but Franciacorta wines can be every bit as firmly structured, aromatic, and balanced as anything from France. As even the most expert sommelier will tell you, evaluating sparkling wines is the most difficult tasting exercise of them all, but in the better wines of Ca’ del Bosco, Bellavista, Cavalleri and others, it’s not so much a specific flavor but a feel that links them to Champagne: Rather than plod across your palate, these wines stand on their tiptoes, tense and nervous, always maintaining their sinewy posture.
Whether Franciacorta’s firm, minerally, aromatic sparklers are ultimately a product of a charmed location or simply a triumph of winemaking technology is the subject of some debate. Either way, the wines are what some would call “correct.” Among many other things, the producers of Franciacorta are extremely well organized, having not only created one of the most tourist-friendly wine zones in Italy but one of the more clear-cut DOCG disciplines. A basic nonvintage cuvée spends at least eighteen months aging in the bottle before release, while a vintage wine spends a minimum of thirty. Grape yields are carefully limited. What can be said on the label is strictly controlled—they don’t, for example, allow the word spumante, which evidently is too suggestive of cheap, off-dry sparklers to be attached to a Franciacorta wine. There’s no escaping a sense that Franciacorta is a planned community, a country club with very strict bylaws.
“In 1968, there was nothing here,” says the magnanimous Maurizio Zanella, the unofficial ambassador of Franciacorta, referring not only to the hill where his giant winery now sits but to Franciacorta as a whole. In his younger days, Zanella flew to the annual VinItaly wine fair in a helicopter (despite the fact that the fair, in Verona, is about forty minutes by car), and he bubbles with the same nervous energy as his wines. A few financial setbacks have tamed him somewhat, and he sold a significant stake in Ca’ del Bosco to the giant Santa Margherita group several years ago. Nevertheless, Zanella exudes the easy confidence of an empire builder, a guy who gets things done. As much as any aspect of the Franciacorta terroir, this attitude goes a long way in explaining why Franciacorta wines are the way they are.
“If you compare us to many other regions of Italy, we don’t really have any tradition to speak of,” Zanella says. “But that was a good thing. Without tradition weighing us down, we were able to make decisions based on what works, not on what came before.”
The pinot noir-based sparkling wines of the Oltrepò Pavese, in Lombardia’s southwestern corner, merit a mention, even though they have been on the wane as dry reds have grown in popularity. Situated at the foot of the Apennines, the hills of the Oltrepò Pavese have attracted increasing interest among Italian wine buffs. Although the zone is one of those wide-ranging DOCs in which everything from sweet, frizzante reds to dry white sparklers are made (there are a total of twenty styles allowed), it is widely believed that the cool, limestone-rich slopes are suited to more than just massproduced quaffers. The DOC includes provisions for a spumante made from a minimum of 70 percent pinot noir, made in the méthode champenoise. Among the top producers of Oltrepò Pavese spumante is the Tenuta Il Bosco estate, owned by the Veneto-based Zonin Group, and there are number of other cantine making spumante, although much of it is destined for the local market.
Of the seventeen DOC zones scattered throughout the vast Lombardia region, nine include provisions for some kind of dry white wine, and most of these are clustered along the western and southern shores of Lake Garda. From the steeper slopes along the west bank down to the richer, heavier clays of the plains above Mantova, a fairly random assortment of grapes is headlined by the well-traveled trebbiano and the star of Soave, garganega, which factor into a handful of Garda-area DOC blends. The only instance in which either is given a prominent role is in the wines of the Lugana DOC, where the reputedly superior subvariety known as trebbiano di Lugana (or trebbiano di Soave) creates fragrant, minerally whites that are a cut above the majority of other trebbiano-based wines in Italy.
Lugana from top producers such as Ca’ dei Frati, which is headquartered in the lakeside resort town of Sirmione, shows off a more floral, spicy, and forwardly fruity side to the trebbiano grape. Most experts chalk this up to the trebbiano di Lugana variety itself (which some scientists say is genetically related to the more aromatic verdicchio of the Marche), as opposed to any aspects of terroir that might contribute. The Lugana zone is in fact hot and flat, with heavy, fertile soils. But rather than become flabby, the better wines of Lugana retain a shimmer of acidity that lends them a kinship to the mountain wines of the Alto Adige. Along with Ca’ dei Frati’s benchmark “I Frati” bottling, other Luganas worth looking for include the Veneto-based Zenato winery’s Lugana “San Benedetto,” and a number of selections from the Provenza estate (which is also known for the spicy rosé known as Chiaretto, made from a local mix of grapes that includes sangiovese, marzemino, barbera, and groppello).
In Franciacorta, meanwhile, producers are opting for rounder, plusher white wines based principally on the local chardonnay, again looking to France for inspiration. But while the sparklers emulate their counterparts in Champagne, the whites under the DOC heading Terre di Franciacorta tend to resemble something more Californian than Burgundian.
At one time sparkling and still wines were grouped together under the Franciacorta DOC, but the local producers petitioned for and got a DOCG designation for the sparklers in 1995, their goal being to associate the name “Franciacorta” solely with sparkling wine, à la Champagne. With Franciacorta elevated to DOCG, a new DOC was created for still wines called Terre di Franciacorta, whose production discipline includes provisions for a Bianco from chardonnay, pinot bianco and/or pinot nero (vinified as a white), and a Rosso from a mix of cabernets sauvignon and franc, merlot, barbera, and nebbiolo. Generally speaking, the Terre di Franciacorta whites have been solid, many of them given a toasty roundness through fermentation and aging in French oak barrels. Ca’ del Bosco’s Terre di Franciacorta Chardonnay is typical of the style, as is the Terre di Franciacorta “Uccellanda” (100 percent chardonnay) from Bellavista. Also worth mentioning is Bellavista’s Terre di Franciacorta Bianco from its vineyards at the Convento dell’Annunciata, which combines chardonnay and pinot bianco to create an extremely rich, fruity wine.
Finally, there’s the Oltrepò Pavese, which, as some producers have found, has the altitudes, soils, and mountain-cooled climate to produce more than just light sipping whites. In the calcareous clays of these often steep slopes, Oltrepò Pavese producers such as Martilde, Ca’ di Frara, and Bruno Verdi are continuing to impress with wines from riesling, particularly the riesling renano subvariety. Although they are lighter-styled wines, the Oltrepò Pavese rieslings are redolent of ripe peaches and white flowers, and like the rieslings of Friuli–Venezia Giulia, they finish crisp and dry. Although many producers are also having success with chardonnay and pinot grigio in the zone, the more aromatic riesling is emerging as the most interesting white from the area. Although they are more difficult to find in the United States, the rieslings of the Oltrepò Pavese are examples of the Italian take on Germanic varieties—they’re fragrant and full of flavor, but made in a more bone-dry style than most of their more northerly counterparts.
Although red wines are made throughout Lombardia, the two principal centers of production are the Oltrepò Pavese, in the southwest, and the Valtellina, one of the most northerly wine zones in all of Italy. And though a number of Bordeaux-style blends are being released to much hype in Franciacorta, the wines have yet to make any serious impact on the market. Probably the best known of the Franciacorta reds is the “Maurizio Zanella” bottling from Ca’ del Bosco, a luxurious barrique-aged blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, and merlot (more interesting is Ca’ del Bosco’s pinot noir called “Pinero”). Otherwise, the Terre di Franciacorta reds tend to be earthy, spicy, simple blends, many of which have a distinctly vegetal note from cabernet franc. Again, that leafy, bell-pepper flavor is often viewed as a flaw, a telltale sign of cabernet (especially franc, but also sauvignon) that isn’t fully mature. Throughout the northern regions of Italy, from Lombardy to Veneto to Alto Adige, producers argue over whether that greenness is in fact a fault or is just the way the cabernet family expresses itself in cooler climates. But either way, it’s a taste that takes some getting used to.
Yet while Franciacorta remains more committed to its sparkling wines, the Oltrepò Pavese, still a huge producer of both its own spumanti and base wines for sparklers produced outside of the zone, is seeing a surge of interest in its reds. It has often been noted that the Oltrepò Pavese was one of the first regions in Italy—if not the first—in which pinot noir was planted. Traditionally, most of the grapes and wines made from pinot noir in the zone were sold off in bulk, especially to large Piedmontese spumante producers such as Cinzano and Gancia. But in recent years, the dry, still, and often barrel-aged pinot noir of the Oltrepò Pavese has become almost trendy in wine circles. Add to this a wider range of solid reds from both barbera and the local bonarda (a synonym for croatina), and the zone has become one of Italy’s new frontiers.
These days, a savvy red-wine drinker who doesn’t want to spend a lot of money has a variety of lesser-known regions to explore for serious but relatively inexpensive wines: there’s Rosso Cònero in the Marche, Castel del Monte in Puglia, the entire island of Sicily, and, increasingly, the Oltrepò Pavese. The name of the zone means “on the other side of the Po from Pavia” and refers to the small chunk of Lombardia wedged between southeastern Piedmont and northwestern Emilia-Romagna, where the Ligurian Apennines begin to make their southward turn.
Oltrepò Pavese is an interesting case. On the one hand, the zone is still a mass-producer of wines, whether they’re base wines for Piedmontese spumanti or bulk wines drunk as sfuso (tap wine) in Milan. Somewhat surprisingly, the Oltrepò Pavese zone turns out as much if not more wine per year than the famously profligate Soave DOC in Veneto. But as in so many other wine zones throughout the peninsula, a growing number of producers are changing their mindset and trying to more fully exploit the favorable natural conditions in the area.
Where most barberas from the zone were once lean and harsh in comparison to the majority of their Piedmontese counterparts, they are increasingly fuller-bodied and lush in the hands of producers such as Martilde and Bruno Verdi. And while most producers were content to make light, semisweet frizzante from bonarda, a growing number are making full, round, well-structured dry reds from the grape. Admittedly, the use of the name bonarda is confusing—the real bonarda is Piedmontese, and nearly extinct at that, whereas in Lombardia the name bonarda is simply a synonym for croatina. But the wines themselves are developing a very clear-cut personality: a deep, brackish color and a core of dark, spicy fruit, with a character that falls somewhere between the edgy reds of Trentino and Alto Adige and the plusher, fruitier reds of the south, such as Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Oltrepò bonarda has that little hint of coffee-ground bitterness, and a fair amount of acid and tannin. The better varietal bottlings coming from Vercesi del Castellazzo, Martilde, Bruno Verdi, Le Fracce, and Zonin’s Tenuta Il Bosco.
Some experts suggest that the best wines of the zone are more traditional blends, most of which are based on a combination of the acidic, aromatic barbera and the plump, generous bonarda. There are two official subzones of the Oltrepò Pavese DOC: Buttafuoco (whose name means “sparks”) and Sangue di Giuda (“blood of Judas”). Both combine barbera and croatina with the local uva rara, ughetta, and occasionally pinot noir. Although both Buttafuoco and Sangue di Giuda can be dry, semisweet, sweet, and often frizzante, the dry, still versions are gaining in popularity. They are fruity, aromatic wines with good acidity for tomato-sauced pastas or light salads with some shaved Grana Padano on top.
And then there’s pinot noir—or pinot nero in Italian—the grape that some say is the future of the Oltrepò Pavese. With altitudes reaching to four hundred meters and higher, and the Apennines a stone’s throw away, the climate in the zone is a cool, continental one, which is a key to maintaining balance in the notoriously delicate pinot noir grape. Many of the above-named Oltrepò producers are showing an increasingly deft touch with the variety, which hasn’t as yet had much success in Italy, mainly because the majority of the wine world still views Italy as simply too hot for the fickle grape. Places like the Oltrepò Pavese, along with a few other pockets across northern Italy, may one day prove the wine world wrong.
Although quality still varies widely, shopping for wine in the Oltrepò Pavese is a little like going to a thrift store: If you’re patient, and you look around a bit, you are bound to find something interesting. And relatively cheap.
More established as a source of distinctive reds is the mountainous zone of Valtellina, a forty-kilometer stretch of spectacular terraced vineyards along the north bank of the Adda River, near Lombardia’s border with Switzerland. This area was historically part of the Swiss canton of Grigioni, its wines drunk by noble families in the court of the Hapsburgs. Even today, the Swiss market is the most important one for the small community of Valtellina winemakers, whose grape of choice is the hard-to-ripen nebbiolo. It’s called chiavennasca here, and is planted in steep, rocky, terraced vineyards at altitudes reaching to a two thousand feet.
Valtellina has a lot in common with the Valle d’Aosta, not only in its striking mountain scenery but in the orientation of its vineyards, which run east-to-west along the contours of the Adda. Driving along the river basin through Alpine towns such as Sondrio and Tirano, the leafy terraces are like knife slices in the mountain wall, punctuated by the pointy church steeples in the tiny hillside settlements. Everything looks as if it could all come tumbling down in a good rain (which it sometimes does).
As in places such as the Alto Adige and the Valle d’Aosta, the Valtellina is its own distinct culture, essentially walled off from its neighbors save for a few mountain passes, many of them ancient trade routes originating in Venice. The people of the Valtellina have been toughened by their rugged surroundings, and their food is hearty mountain fare: aromatic cheeses such as Bitto (a mix of cow’s and goat’s milk) and Casera (cow) are a specialty, as is the air-dried beef known as bresaola, all of it chased down with the tart, complex, intensely perfumed nebbiolos (or chiavennascas) of the region.
Simply put, the Valtellina is one of the most fascinating and unique red-wine zones in Italy. When or how the nebbiolo grape arrived in these parts is anyone’s guess, but it is widely believed that the vineyard terraces, which climb the valley walls in giant steps, were built by the ancient Liguri, who used sand, clay, and rocks hauled up by hand from the valley floor. Even today the angle of the slopes makes any mechanization impossible, and the mere thought of having to harvest grapes in this place is enough to make your thighs burn.
Commercial winemaking in the Valtellina dates back more than a century. One of the first producers in the region was a horse trader and innkeeper named Nino Negri, who married a Swiss noblewoman whose castle, in the village of Chiuso near Sondrio, is still the home of the winery. Negri created his azienda agricola (agricultural firm) in 1897, which makes it one of the oldest commercial wineries in Italy. His son Carlo, who ran the winery well into the 1970s, became one of the first formally trained enologists in the country. Yet even after it became a part of unified Italy, the region’s leanings have always been toward Switzerland.
In fact, the Valtellina was traditionally a wine lake for the Swiss, viewed as the red wine–producing south in the same way that the Alto Adige was the “warm” southerly flank of Austria. According to Casimiro Maule, who has been the winemaker at Nino Negri since 1971, the Swiss market has historically been both boon and bane to Valtellina wine producers.
“In the past, Swiss importers were required to buy a certain quantity of Valtellina wine,” he begins. “There was a trade accord between the Swiss and Italian governments. In the early eighties, we were sending 4.5 million liters of vino sfuso alone to Switzerland. But about eight years ago the accord was eliminated, and that export total has gone way down. In some ways, though, this was good: Instead of just blindly shipping off wine, people have reduced production and raised their standards.”
According to the Valtellina producers’ consorzio, there are only twenty-one actual bottlers of Valtellina wines, many of whom buy grapes from the hundreds of tiny growers still tending plots in the region. Only a handful of producers make enough wine to be known outside of their home region, but those who do—Nino Negri, Triacca, Sertoli Salis, Sandro Fay, and Rainoldi, to name the biggest—are turning out nebbiolos to rival Barolo. They do not typically have the depth of concentration of their Piedmontese cousins, but their often ethereal aromas of tea and tar and tobacco lend them a certain grace and style that places them in their own distinct category.
Despite the high altitudes of the vineyards and the northerly latitude of the Valtellina, the zone boasts a unique combination of geography and climate that even the reticent nebbiolo can adapt to. Much in the same way that the cool climate in the Alto Adige is moderated by warm, dry breezes off Lake Garda, the Valtellina vineyards are similarly affected by the breva winds that whisk up through the Adda Valley from Lake Como. Additionally, the east-west orientation of the vineyards, all of which are planted on the north bank of the river (and thus face south), places the vines in the direct path of the sun all day long. “The intensity of sunlight here is similar to that of Pantelleria in Sicily,” says Carlo Alberto Panont, who runs the consorzio of Valtellina wine producers, which is based in Sondrio. “What’s incredible is that there are tropical plants like fichi d’india [prickly pears] growing in the terraces, despite the latitude here.” The terraces, he adds, are like a giant solar panel, collecting the sun’s rays all day long and storing some of that heat in the rocks and pebbles in the soil.
Still, the nebbiolo of the Valtellina is a leaner, finer, more feminine style than that grown farther to the south. Although some wines from specific vineyard sites can approach Barolo in concentration, producers have traditionally turned to appassimento (drying grapes) as a means of adding concentration. The term sfursat, or sforsato, is used in the Valtellina to describe their tarry, glycerine-rich dried-grape wines from nebbiolo, which are reminiscent of Amarone but with a more savory, spicy aromatic profile.
“Compared to Barolo, Valtellina wines are more nervous,” says Casimiro Maule. “To arrive at the concentration of a Barolo we have to dry the grapes. I remember Carlo Negri used to say that the wines of Valtellina were like the people of Valtellina: They’re tough at first. You really need to get to know them, to give them time.”
Among the non-sforsato reds, the best are said to hail from a string of four officially delimited vineyards, which occupy a twenty-kilometer stretch from Sondrio to Teglio. These are what might be called the grand crus of Valtellina, and the wines made from their grapes are labeled with the Valtellina Superiore DOCG. Each of the four vineyard sites is named for a church or castle in the subzone they inhabit, and each offers a slightly different expression of nebbiolo based on its exposure and aspect.
Just west of Sondrio, the Sassella vineyard covers a total of 368 acres, making it the second-largest after Valgella. It is considered the rockiest of the four Valtellina Superiore crus (thus the name, derived from the Italian word sasso, for stone), and is also extremely steep. The grapes here often wither in the intense summer heat that collects in the rocky soils. Sassella reds are among the easier vineyard-designated Valtellina wines to find, and are usually among the more powerful and concentrated. Negri, Triacca, and Rainoldi, all of which export to the States, make Sassella wines.
Just east of Sondrio, the slopes in Grumello are less steep, with larger terraces and more soil, generally producing more immediately giving, fruit-forward wines. Nino Negri produces one of the few commercially available examples.
Farther east of Sondrio, Inferno is the smallest, rockiest, and steepest of the four crus. Casimiro Maule of Nino Negri says that the rocks absorb the sun and cause the vineyard to be “an inferno to work in” during the summer months. Because of its favorable aspect, it pulls in the sun all day and generally produces the most deeply colored, powerful wines of the four Valtellina Superiore vineyards. Both Rainoldi and Negri are producing wines from among the 150 acres of Inferno vines.
The easternmost and highest-altitude subzone, Valgella is also the largest vineyard zone of the four. Valgella’s vines are the latest to mature, as much as two weeks behind Sassella. Generally speaking, the Valgella wines are the most delicate and perfumed of the lot. The leading producer in the zone is Sandro Fay.
Aside from questions of terroir, however, Casimiro Maule says that the producers of the Valtellina are focused on making their often angular, hard-edged reds more lush and immediately pleasurable. The goal is to tack on a layer of ripe cherry fruit and maybe some toasty oak without losing the leathery aromatics so unique to the grape as grown in the region. Among the modern leaders in the region are Domenico Triacca, who has conducted extensive experiments with vine-training systems to bring out more concentration in chiavennasca, while Maule has set his sights on new techniques in the winery.
“One of the big changes here is similar to that of Barolo,” Maule explains. “When we ferment chiavennasca now, we don’t let it sit on its skins as long as we once did. Generally speaking, you extract all the color you need from the skins in the first forty-eight hours of maceration; after that it’s a question of the quality of tannins you’re looking for. In the past we would leave the wine to macerate longer, sometimes forty days or more, and this not only extracts bitter tannins from the skins but also seed tannins, which are unpleasant. What we’re aiming for is a more accessible style.”
Either way, there will always be a spicy, tannic bite to Valtellina reds, but that is part of their charm. While sforsato versions satisfy drinkers who want a bigger, rounder, more fruit-forward style, the more straightforward Superiore wines are for those who prefer a sensation of earthiness along with the fruit. For a taste of Alpine Lombardy, cut a few rounds of dark-grained bread, melt some Gorgonzola over the top, and chase it down with an angular, aromatic Inferno or Sassella. As the tannin and acid of the wine slices through the fatty cheese like a knife, you realize this is what red wine is all about.
It isn’t entirely true to say that Lombardia is the wine region that has everything. Save for a handful of passito moscatos and frizzante malvasias made in the Oltrepò Pavese, and a bunch of semisweet Lambruscos made in the plains south of Mantova, sweet wine is relatively scarce in Lombardia. In a place famed for cheese, butter, cream and risotto, it may be that no one has any room for dessert.
PROVINCES: Bergamo (BG), Brescia (BS), Como (CO), Cremona (CR), Mantova (MN), Milano (MI), Pavia (PV), Sondrio (SO), Varese (VA)
CAPITAL: Milano
KEY WINE TOWNS: Erbusco (Franciacorta), Pavia (Oltrepò Pavese), Sirmione (Garda), Sondrio (Valtellina)
TOTAL VINEYARD AREA*: 21,956 hectares, or 54,254 acres. Rank: 11th
TOTAL WINE PRODUCTION*: 1,360,000 hectoliters, or 35,931,200 gallons (11th); 38.5% white, 61.5% red
DOC WINE PRODUCED*: 55.6% of total (4th)
SPECIALTY FOODS: bresaola (air-cured beef); butter; Bitto (cow’s-and-goat’s milk cheese from Valtellina); Grana Padano (declassified parmigiano-style cow’s-milk cheese); Gorgonzola (blue-veined cow’s-milk cheese); mostarda (whole fruit pickled with mustard seeds); Robiola (red-rinsed cow’s-milk cheese from Bergamo); Taleggio (washed-rind cow’s-milk cheese); rice; speck (smoked bacon).
*1997 figures. Rankings out of twenty regions total (Trentino-Alto–Adige counted as one). Source: Istituto Statistica Mercati Agro-Alimentari (ISMEA), Rome.
CHARDONNAY: The dominant variety in the Franciacorta zone, used in both méthode champenoise sparklers and still whites. Also grown in the Oltrepò Pavese and in certain zones near Lake Garda.
GARGANEGA: More famous in Soave, in neighboring Veneto; it is used in some white blends in the Garda area.
PINOT BIANCO: The second white grape of Franciacorta.
TREBBIANO DI LUGANA: Also called trebbiano di Soave, a purportedly superior subvariety of the large trebbiano family. Thought to be related to the verdicchio of the Marche. At its best in the wines of the Lugana DOC, on the southern shores of Lake Garda.
RIESLING RENANO/: Two distinct subvarieties found in both Oltrepò Pavese and
RIESLING ITALICO: the western shores of Garda. Renano is considered the superior of the two, producing dry whites with distinctly peachy, flowery aromas.
BARBERA: Found throughout the Oltrepò Pavese, this import from Piemonte tends to be a little gruff in comparison to Barberas from Alba or Asti.
BONARDA: The name used for croatina in Lombardia. Produces plump, berryish reds on its own and is also combined with barbera in Oltrepò Pavese blends.
CHIAVENNASCA (NEBBIOLO): A local subvariety of nebbiolo of unclear origins; it produces wines of great perfume and finesse in the high mountain terraces above Sondrio.
LAMBRUSCO: Found also in Emilia-Romagna, it is grown on a swath of Lombardy’s plains south of Mantova.
PINOT NOIR: Growing in popularity for fragrant dry reds in the Oltrepò Pavese, and also used in Franciacorta’s sparkling and still wines.
UVA RARA: Literally, “rare grape.” Used in Oltrepò Pavese blends.
Since the vintners of Franciacorta tend to release vintage-dated wines only in years they deem appropriate, much of the worry of “which” vintage is taken out of the equation when shopping for sparklers. And while the reds of the Oltrepò Pavese are on the rise, there hasn’t yet been a critical mass of wines that would merit long aging: most are plump bonardas and fine, fragrant pinot noirs that will be at their best two to three years from the vintage. Valtellina wines, however, have the kind of sharp acidity and biting tannins that demand a few years’ cellaring. In speaking with a variety of Valtellina producers, these are the vintages that stand out in their memories: 1985, ’88, ’89, ’90, ’95, ’97, ’98, ’99, ’00, and ’01 .
In Franciacorta, don’t miss the Bellavista (030-776-20-00) or Ca’del Bosco (030-776-61-11) wineries, both of which are open to visitors. In Valtellina, the regional wine consorzio provides maps of hikes that take you through the terraced vineyards. For more information on both zones, contact the Consorzio per la Tutela del Franciacorta (030-776-04-77; www.franciacorta.net) and the Consorzio Vini Valtellina (0342-52-72-47; www.valtellinavini.com). If you’re a serious foodie, however, your travels in Lombardia are likely to take you not only outside of Milan but outside of the major wine zones, into the southeastern cities of Cremona and Mantova—two of the premier food towns in all of Italy. In the little village of Quistello is the fantastic restaurant Ambasciata (Via Martiri di Belfiore 33; 0376-619-003), home to spectacular fresh pastas and a deep Italian wine cellar. For one of the great takes on the classic bollito misto (boiled meats), try La Sosta in Cremona (Via Sicardo 9; 0372-456-656).
Zenato Lugana “San Benedetto,” $
Ca’ dei Frati Lugana “I Frati,” $
Here are two light yet flavorful whites that show off a more aromatic side to the much-maligned trebbiano grape. Firmly acidic and redolent of sour apples, both wines have a cool, dewy, almost grassy quality. Although some producers are experimenting with barrel fermentation (such as Ca’ dei Frati with its “Il Brolettino” bottling), the appeal of these whites is their freshness. Try them with grilled whole fish stuffed with herbs to highlight the similarly herbal qualities of the wines.
Bellavista Franciacorta Brut, $$
Ca’ del Bosco Franciacorta Satèn, $$$
Cavalleri Franciacorta “Collezione Rosé,” $$
Both the Cavalleri and Ca’ del Bosco wines will carry vintage dates, but don’t be concerned if you can’t find the same year of each. The purpose of this tasting is to check out the style spectrum of Franciacorta: from a dry, minerally, apple-scented nonvintage brut to a creamier Satèn (made in a crémant style, only from white grapes) to a spicier, cherry-scented rosé. The Satèn is the softest on the palate, the rosé the fullest, the nonvintage brut the crispest. Not just apéritifs, these wines can stand up to a wide variety of food: Try them with rich dishes such as a creamy polenta or a risotto, and let their scrubbing bubbles go to work.
Aldo Rainoldi Valtellina Superiore Sassella Riserva, $
Nino Negri Valtellina Sfursat “5 Stelle,” $$$
The contrast here is between a firm, fine Valtellina Superiore and a plusher sforsato, or sfursat, a wine made from semidried grapes. What distinguishes these wines is their aromatic complexity. Start with the Sassella, with its scents of leather and tobacco and powerful structure, then move to the sfursat, which builds on the characteristically savory aromas of chiavennasca (nebbiolo) by adding a dollop of sappy red-berry fruit. The process of drying the grapes for sfursat helps soften the tannins of the wine, making it more accessible when young. For even sappier, Amarone-like sfursat, check out the wines of Triacca as well as Rainoldi’s “Ca’ Rizzieri.” Negri’s powerfully built Inferno, meanwhile, is a good example of the more angular Valtellina Superiore style.
Martilde Oltrepò Pavese Bonarda “Zaffo,” $$
Vercesi del Castellazzo Oltrepò Pavese Bonarda, $$
Though a little harder to find, these are two round, plump reds with pronounced flavors of “black” fruits: think of blackberries, black cherries, black currants. At the same time, there’s considerable weight of fruit extract in both bottlings—these are wines of some substance, excellent choices for one of the rich beef- or pork-filled pastas of the Po plain.
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VALLE D’AOSTA
Covers the entire province, and includes thirteen styles of wine, most of them identified by grape name. Twelve other styles carry the Valle d’Aosta designation plus of one of the following seven subzone designations.
1 Blanc de Morgex et de La Salle
2 Enfer d’Arvier
3 Torrette
4 Nus
5 Chambave
6 Arnad-Montjovet
7 Donnas/Donnaz
