Barone Pizzini

The Free Bacchus Story

In the middle of the 1990s Silvano Brescianini asked whether the products being sprayed in the vineyards might be causing cancer in the people doing the spraying. He has described it since as a simple question that almost nobody in Franciacorta was asking at the time. The estate went organic in 1998 on the strength of it, the first in the region to do so, and the first organic Franciacorta was made from the 2002 harvest.

Franciacorta is worth knowing if you have never bought a bottle. It sits in Lombardy, at the foot of the Alps near Lake Iseo, and it makes sparkling wine by the same method as Champagne — a second fermentation inside the bottle it is sold in, which is slow, expensive and the reason the bubbles are fine rather than fizzy. It is not a cheaper substitute for Champagne so much as a warmer-climate cousin, generally a little rounder and softer in the fruit.

Brescianini's line on how his own wine is finished is the most useful sentence anyone has given us about sparkling wine, and it is nine words long. Most sparkling wine takes a small dose of sugar at the very end, to round off the edges the acidity leaves. His argument for leaving it out is that if the base wine is good, it does not need the help.

The estate goes back to 1870 and two brothers, Enrico and Bernardino Pizzini. The winery they work in now is not that old: a bioarchitecture building by the architect Claudio Gasparotti opened in 2007, dug into the slope and built to keep the cellar cool without spending much on doing it — which is the same argument as the farming, applied to the roof.

The certificate is Valoritalia's, read in the EU's TRACES system this month rather than taken from the label. It covers the whole operation, and it is honest about the parts still in conversion, which is the sort of detail a certifier records and a marketing department does not.