It’s a funny thing about Italy and sparkling wine. When it comes to fizzy, sometimes the whole country gets ignored. At other times, the wrong fizzies are emphasized. Italy is a great bubbly wine country…but it’s so damned hard to keep track of the wines, most wine lovers are confused!
I blame it on something typically Italian: organizational clarity is not among the country’s strengths.
I’ll never forget my visit to L. A.’s Valentino, one of America’s best Italian restaurants, about 25 years ago—and one of America’s best restaurants for Italian wine. It was an elegant evening all around, and I wanted to start it off with a glass of dry, elegant Italian sparkling wine. Unfortunately, the Italians at the time didn’t have a perfect word to describe such a thing—other than “spumante,” possibly. So we asked the maître d’ for glasses of spumante. “Spumante?” he responded, seemingly puzzled. I verified. He sighed. And out came four glasses of sweet, fizzy Asti Spumante.
It’s likely that this scenario wouldn’t be repeated today. For one thing, the name “Asti Spumante” no longer exists. It had such a vulgar reputation—though sweet and fizzy Moscato wine from Piemonte really can be delicious at the right moment—that they changed the name to Moscato d’Asti (if you haven’t tried it with strawberries, get on this now!).
For another thing, since that time the Italians DID decide on a word for dry, elegant, sparkling wine. The region that produces the most Champagne-like wine in Italy, in Lombardia, decided that they definitely needed a name—to compete with the object of all those “let’s have a glass of Champagne” requests. After years of deliberation, they decided to call their wine “Franciacorta.” But I think they made a mistake. For starters, it seems to refer to France, home of Champagne—though their goal was to compete with France. Secondly, they were trying to find a name that rolls off the tongue at graduations, celebrations and weddings. But, ah…they didn’t exactly succeed with Franciacorta! Most people don’t even know how to pronounce it!
But then we get into other problems.
Let’s start at the top, with Franciacorta. I do agree that this is Italy’s closest wine to Champagne. I’m rather fond of Franciacorta. The problem is that it hogs most of the Italian sparkling wine attention—and it’s damned expensive! Usually there’s a bottle of Champagne available that costs about the same—so why spend your $100 in a restaurant on Franciacorta?
I have a different problem with the other Italian sparkler that grabs attention—Prosecco. May I say it? I don’t get it. There has been a HUGE boom of Prosecco consumption in the U.S. in the last five years—an almost completely senseless boom, in my opinion! It is always at least a little sweet, sometimes very sweet, without compensating acidity, and it is annoyingly vapid.
While Franciacorta and Prosecco grab the Italian bubbly spotlight, there are local sparklers from all over the boot that are delicious, and usually figure mightily in the local cuisine. Their problem: they are usually local wines, without important names, without names that echo past the local trattoria.
And here’s where the particularly American problem kicks in. Many of our wine-drinkers familiarizing themselves with wine think that the only wines that count are the ones in the easy textbook. Italian sparkling? “Oh…Franciacorta and Prosecco cover that subject,” they may think.
But they don’t! Usually (especially in the case of Prosecco) I’d MUCH rather drink one of Italy’s more local sparkling wines!
My advice to you this summer: if you hear good merchants or sommeliers singing the praises of unknown Italian sparklers that ain’t Franciacorta or Prosecco—pay attention!
BONUS: THE FRIZZANTE/SPUMANTE DIFFERENCE
Though your little-known bottles of delicious Italian bubbly wine may well have confounding labels, there is one guide you can use to at least learn something about what’s in the bottle.
If a wine says frizzante, it is likely to be only lightly sparking. Technically, it often has between 2.5 and 3.5 “bars” of pressure (the official way of calculating bubble strength in a bottle). Prosecco is often frizzante…though, of course, not always. Sometimes it’s spumante.
If a wine says spumante, it is likely to be fully sparkling, like most Champagnes (Champagne often clocks in at 5 to 6 bars of pressure, and so does spumante).
Is it possible to find a bottle of Italian bubbly that doesn’t use these key words in quite this way?
Is the Pope Catholic, no matter where he comes from?
