Botticino DOC

A very small red denomination on the eastern edge of Brescia, covering parts of the city itself and the communes of Botticino and Rezzato. It sits directly below the quarries that supply one of Italy’s best-known building stones, and grows on the same rock.

The Terroir The registered file is short and chemical. The soil is above all rich in limestone, with a good quantity of potassium together with a fair dose of total phosphoric anhydride. It then uses a term worth translating: apart from local variation, the ground has an increasingly ferrettizzato aspect — ferretto being the iron-rich red residue left when limestone weathers over long periods, which stains the soil and holds heat. The climate it calls typically Mediterranean, with no extreme limits that inhibit the cultivation of the vine.

Marmo di Botticino The stone quarried above the vineyards is a pale, dense limestone used since Roman times and, most visibly, for the Vittoriano in Rome. Brescia is built of it. The vineyards occupy a narrow south-facing amphitheatre between the quarry faces and the plain, and the exposed rock does what rock does — radiates stored heat back at the vines after dark, in a zone that would otherwise be marginal for ripening Barbera.

Grape Varieties Barbera leads, at around a third to two-thirds of the blend, with Marzemino, Sangiovese and Schiava Gentile making up the rest. The file describes a ruby wine with garnet reflections, vinous and intense, dry, harmonious, justly tannic, at a minimum 11.5 per cent alcohol and 20 g/l of dry extract. A riserva is registered.

The Critical Take Botticino is one of the smallest denominations in Lombardy — a few dozen hectares — and it makes a wine that has no equivalent nearby: warmer and rounder than an Oltrepò red, more structured than a Garda one, with the limestone giving a savoury, almost chalky finish under quite ripe fruit. Barbera does unexpectedly well on this ground. The threat is not quality but geography: the zone is wedged between a city, a motorway and an active quarry, and there is nowhere for it to expand.

Three Brescian Reds Botticino sits alongside Cellatica and Capriano del Colle as the surviving fragments of what was once a substantial belt of red-wine vineyard around Brescia. All three are tiny, all three are squeezed by the city, and all three make wine that never leaves the province.

At the Table Brescian cooking: casoncelli, spiedo bresciano, braised beef, polenta, and Bagoss. Serve at 16–17°C.

Benchmark Producers Noventa, the reference for the zone, and Cascina San Giovanni.