TOP-TIER ITALIAN SPARKLING WINES
Bubbles – bollicine! Italians can’t get enough of them: any excuse will do to open a bottle of fizz. Despite a long-standing tradition of producing sparkling wine in Italy, until relatively recently consumers were probably more familiar with the frizzante (lightly sparkling) styles represented by Lambrusco and Prosecco.
Nowadays, more and more spumante (fully sparkling) wine is made by the ‘metodo classico’ (traditional method, refermented in the bottle), even though, rather ironically, the Charmat or tank method used by many frizzante producers was pioneered by an Italian, Federico Martinotti, at the end of the 19th century.
In 1902 in Trento, Giulio Ferrari first used the metodo classico to convert local Chardonnay grapes into Italy’s original Champagne lookalike. Since then, increasing numbers of wineries have taken to finishing off the fermentation process in bottle ˆ la Champagne, to allow the wine to develop greater finesse with bottle age.
Trento DOC remains one of Italy’s most important denominations for metodo classico wines and is outstripped in terms of production numbers only by Franciacorta DOCG. Often referred to as Trentodoc, the denomination, created in 1993, covers the mountainous area surrounding the city of Trento in the northeast.
Franciacorta, from the foothills south of Lake Iseo in the province of Brescia in Lombardy (northwest), has only produced metodo classico wines on a regular basis since the 1960s, despite achieving DOC status before Trento in 1967 – it was upgraded to DOCG in 1995.
The other two principal metodo classico denominations (both now DOCG) are significantly smaller: also in Lombardy, Oltrepò Pavese lies close to Pavia; while in Piedmont, Alta Langa covers the hills east of Alba which skirt the border with the Liguria region.
Regional flavour
Common to all four
