Brachetto d'Acqui / Acqui DOCG

A sweet, sparkling red wine unique to the hills around Acqui Terme in the Monferrato (Alessandria province) — one of a tiny handful of wines in the world that is simultaneously sweet, red, sparkling, and genuinely elegant. Elevated to DOCG in 1996, it is built entirely around the Brachetto grape, one of Piedmont’s most aromatic indigenous varieties.

The Grape and Terroir Brachetto is ancient — legend claims Julius Caesar brought it to Cleopatra. Whether or not the story is true, the grape’s perfume is genuinely extraordinary: intensely floral, with wild strawberry, rose petal, musk, and red raspberry that emerge without any winemaking tricks. The soils around Acqui are calcareous clay with good mineral content, concentrating the aromatic compounds that make the variety so distinctive.

The Styles

• Spumante: The classic form. Fully sparkling, gently sweet, typically around 5.5% alcohol.
• Frizzante: Lightly sparkling, slightly drier, more casual in style.
• Passito: A rare still, sweet version made from dried grapes — richer, more concentrated, and deeply complex.

The Critical Take The “chocolate pairing” reputation undersells it. At its best, Brachetto d’Acqui is a wine of genuine aromatic complexity — low alcohol, never cloying, and far more versatile than its reputation suggests. Try it with strawberries, fresh raspberries, or soft cheeses, not just dessert.

La Bollente Acqui Terme is a spa town and has been since the Romans, who called it Aquae Statiellae. Water comes out of a fountain in the middle of the old town at seventy-five degrees, hot enough to scald, and it has been doing so continuously for two thousand years. The town’s prosperity was built on that spring, and the wine grew up as an accessory to a visiting trade rather than as a peasant staple — which is part of why it was always aromatic, sweet and made to charm.

A Category in Retreat Sweet sparkling red has had a hard thirty years. Production of Brachetto d’Acqui has fallen very sharply since its peak, and the denomination was permitted to shorten its name to plain Acqui partly in the hope that a shorter, less specific label would sell better. It has not obviously helped. The wine is excellent and the market for it is smaller each year, which is a straightforward commercial problem rather than a quality one.

The Caesar Story The claim that Caesar sent Brachetto to Cleopatra is repeated on a great many back labels and has no evidential basis whatever. What is documented is much later and duller: the variety appears in Piedmontese records from the eighteenth century, and the modern sparkling style was developed at the end of the nineteenth.

At the Table Strawberries and raspberries above all, then fresh cheeses, and yes, dark chocolate — but it is better before dessert than with it. Serve genuinely cold, 6–8°C, and open the bottle the day you drink it.

Benchmark Producers Braida, Marenco, Banfi (Rosa Regale).