Emilia-Romagna

Emilia-Romagna is two regions bolted together and its wine reflects that. Emilia, to the west, is flat, prosperous and makes fizzy red. Romagna, to the east, is hill country and makes Sangiovese. They have almost nothing in common except the best food in Italy, which both of them are built to wash down.

The Landscape Half the region sits in the Po valley and the other half runs up the northern Apennine ridge towards Liguria and Tuscany. The hills are the interesting part: a marly-arenaceous flysch formation several kilometres deep, with the lower valleys eroded into the gullied badlands the Italians call calanchi. West of Castell’Arquato the boundary between plain and Apennine is marked by the first spurs, where Pliocene and Pleistocene marine formations break the surface. The Adriatic moderates the whole coastal strip; everywhere else is semi-continental.

Spungone Romagna’s best vineyard land sits on a specific thing with a local name. Spungone is a long ridge of marine limestone, packed with fossil shells and other organic debris, that runs from the southern edge of Imola through Marzeno near Faenza and on to Capocollo between Forlì and Cesena. It is porous, calcareous and free-draining, and the sites on it — around Bertinoro and Predappio above all — are where Romagnolo Sangiovese stops being a commodity and starts being a wine worth arguing about. Further west, Lambrusco grows on the Pliocene-Pleistocene soils of the Modena and Reggio hills and on the alluvial plains below them, while the Colli Piacentini sit between the Tidone, Trebbia and Arda valleys at 150 to 350 metres.

Older Than Almost Anywhere The first farming settlements around Bellaria and Fiorano Modenese date to about the sixth century BC, but there is archaeological evidence of cultivated vines — and possibly the first tentative attempts at fermentation — as far back as the eighteenth century BC. Fossilised seeds and roots of wild or part-domesticated vine have been dated between the twentieth and tenth centuries BC. The likeliest candidate for what was being fermented is Lambrusco, which may be the ancestral vine of the whole region.

The Grapes Lambrusco is not one grape but a family, and the distinctions matter more than almost anyone outside the region admits: Sorbara is pale, sharp and the finest; Grasparossa di Castelvetro is darker, firmer and more tannic; Salamino is the most planted; Maestri and Marani fill out the blends. Sangiovese carries Romagna. Albana was the first Italian white to be awarded a DOCG. Alongside them are Trebbiano Romagnolo, Pignoletto — which is Grechetto di Todi under a Bolognese name — Ortrugo and Malvasia di Candia Aromatica in the Colli Piacentini, where Barbera and Croatina blend to make Gutturnio.

The Critical Take Lambrusco has the worst reputation-to-quality ratio of any wine in Italy, and it was self-inflicted: the sweet, industrial, screw-capped export boom of the 1970s and 80s buried a genuinely excellent dry wine under a joke. Dry Lambrusco di Sorbara — pale as rosé, bone dry, sharply acidic — is among the best food wines in the country and is finally being taken seriously again. Romagnolo Sangiovese is the other correction due: it is earlier-ripening and softer than the Tuscan version, and the Spungone sites have proved it can be serious. Albana’s DOCG, awarded in 1987, was widely regarded as political at the time; the wine has only recently grown into it.

At the Table This is the region of Parmigiano Reggiano, prosciutto di Parma, culatello, mortadella, tortellini in brodo, tagliatelle al ragù and traditional balsamic vinegar. The cooking is fat, salt and richness, and a cold, dry, fizzy red cuts through it exactly as intended. Lambrusco with a plate of cured pork is not a novelty pairing; it is the reason the wine exists.

Where to Start A dry Lambrusco di Sorbara, properly chilled, which will surprise anyone who thinks they know the wine. Then a Romagna Sangiovese Riserva from Bertinoro or Predappio.