Ep 542: Franciacorta -- Italy's Elite Sparkling Wine Region
Wine for Normal People
Wine for Normal People
4.6 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With the holidays coming, I thought it would be a good time to do a show on a different kind of sparkling wine, so this time I cover Italy’s premier traditional method sparkling wine, Franciacorta.
Map: Consorzio per la tutela del Franciacorta
Franciacorta is a high quality Italian sparkling wine made in the area of Brescia in Lombardy (the Italian region where Milan is located). Franciacorta, as a sparkling wine, came into being in the 1960s but it didn’t take long for it to gain a favorable reputation, which still holds today. With very distinctive geographical features and a unique microclimate, the wines here are marked by a balance of excellent acidity and lovely aromas of fruit, flowers, nuts and more.
The thing that makes Franciacorta stand out among other sparklers from Italy is that wines from this region can only be produced using the traditional method (like Champagne, unlike Prosecco) and must be made primarily from the French grapes – Chardonnay, Pinot nero (Pinot noir), and Pinot bianco (Pinot blanc).
Photo: Consorzio per la tutela del Franciacorta
Despite the similarities with their French counterpart, the terroir in Franciacorta presents weather patterns that include a lake effect, Alpine breezes, and ample wind. The entire area was formed by glacial movement – no by a small sea receding and leaving a bed of chalky limestone as was the case in Champagne.
Priced at a premium, these wines are ideal if you love Champagne or sparkling wine but want something fruitier, fuller, and with less piercing acidity.
Photo: Consorzio per la tutela del Franciacorta
In this show I cover the history, terroir, grapes, winemaking, and the three types of Franciacorta: nonvintage, rosé, and saten and the overlying classifications of millesimato and riserva.
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Main information sources: https://franciacorta.wine/en/
Franciacorta DOCG Regulatory document
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Wine for Normal People, the podcast for people who like wine, but not the snobbery that goes with it. |
| 0:15.7 | I'm your host Elizabeth Schneider, author of the Wine for Normal People book and certified wine dork. |
| 0:21.4 | This show is sponsored by my exclusive sponsor, Wine Access, the best place to discover |
| 0:27.7 | limited production wines from around the world. Go to wineaccess.com slash normal to join my |
| 0:33.8 | wine club. Make sure you sign up for the emails because the Black Friday sale is coming |
| 0:39.0 | up and you don't want to miss it. I may have something special for you planned. So make sure |
| 0:43.9 | you get on that today. The sale is amazing. It's once a year. Wine goes on sale on Black Friday, too. |
| 0:49.1 | Wine access.com slash normal. Listen to the middle of the show for more details. |
| 0:59.9 | How unbelievably awesome last week's podcast was with Monica. |
| 1:02.0 | She's from Jersey. |
| 1:04.2 | I'm from Long Island originally. |
| 1:08.8 | We had our critics hats on talking about wine events. |
| 1:11.2 | If you haven't listened to that show, I think it was pretty helpful. |
| 1:14.6 | The feedback that we got from the patrons was that it was a useful show. |
| 1:19.2 | Also, of course, not without entertainment, because if you're going to get two tri-state area girls together, you're going to have some fun. |
| 1:22.0 | That's just the way it goes. |
| 1:23.5 | So great show if you haven't listened to that and very practical, which is fantastic. And now I'm looking at the calendar and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, it's almost 2025. Where to 2024 go? But I'm also thinking it's been almost a year since the format of the show changed. And most of you seem to still be with me. Some of you have joined and |
| 1:46.5 | probably don't even know what the show used to be like. That's great too. And I'm looking at the |
| 1:51.2 | rest of the calendar. And I'm like, oh my gosh. So there's going to be a bunch of shows on Rioja, |
| 1:55.6 | which I am so excited about. And if you're a patron, you got a bunch of postings on real, how to give you |
| 2:00.9 | some background to prepare you for these shows, which are going to be amazing. And then we got |
| 2:05.4 | like one or two more shows. And then I'm going to take my annual break. And we are going to start up |
... |
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