When the wine industry is its own worst enemy

The wine industry is often its own worst enemy, creating complication and confusion over a delicious beverage made from fermented grape juice.

I reckon that if you asked 100 Australian wine drinkers to name a sparkling wine region in Italy, maybe half of them would name Prosecco. The number able to identify Franciacorta would be in low single figures.

Franciacorta, in Lombardy, has around 2,000 hectares planted for its sparkling wine production. But it announced early this month that it is diving the region into sub-zones.

Remarkably, it plans no few than 134 sub zones - an absurd figure when even wine aficionados find it hard to remember the 12 Cru of Beaujolais.

Industry analyst https://www.wine-searcher.com/ slammed the inanity of making wine more complicated, saying: "It's utterly ridiculous. Nobody cares about Franciacorta that much."

After all, Franciacorta produces just 1/35th of the sparkling wine made in Prosecco. 

Many of the wines are excellent, certainly, but... 

The website https://winenews.it/ says the new appellations "precisely and meticulously demarcated by the 'wine cartographer', Alessandro Masnaghetti, are all about emphasising regional diversity."

The Franciacorta Consorzio said in a press release: "Three years of quiet work have now culminated in the first Franciacorta Vineyard and Zone Map based on the expertise of Alessandro Masnaghetti, world famous journalist and cartographer, who produced accurate and meticulous mapping of 134 zones within the denomination designed to find the right balance between detail, zone coverage, history and tradition."

Yawn already.

An Italian option for Chablis lovers

It was a delightful summer afternoon in Verona's Piazza Brà.

The many cafes and bars were buzzing as the adjacent Roman amphitheatre was being prepared for an opera performance.

This being the Veneto, we should be sipping on a glass of Soave, or perhaps a Valpolicella or Bardolino.

Our sommelier has other ideas; "definitely a glass of Lugana" he advises.

I'm a lover of Chablis, Sancerre, South African chenin blanc and Hunter semillon, but Lugana has so far escaped my radar. 

It's crisp, aromatic, citrusy, dry and refreshing, is best served chilled and has some nice textural characters.

It comes from a region near Lake Garda that is partially in the Veneto and partially in Lombardy. And its is bloody delicious. I have a new vinous friend.

Lugana, it turns out, is a popular Italian DOC white wine domestically that has not been exported much.

The production area goes from the southern coast of Lake Garda to the morainic hills, halfway between the province of Verona and the province of Brescia.

It is delicate and fragrant on the nose, rich in minerality on the palate (hence the similarity to Chablis and the whites of the Macon).

The Lugana Denominazione di Origine Controllata produces both a table wine and a sparkling wine.

The wines are made from what is locally called turbiana, or Trebbiano di Lugana, and it is a very close relative of verdicchio.

British wine bible Decanter recently devoted a multi-page article to the wines of Lugana in its May edition.

Some of the top names in Italian wine have bought land and vineyards in the area, so we can, perhaps, expect to see more Lugana down the track.