Lombardy (Lombardia)

Lombardy is Italy’s richest and most populous region, and its wine gets discussed far less than it deserves. It contains the country’s best traditional-method sparkling wine, its most vertiginous mountain viticulture, and its largest single underachiever — three things with almost nothing in common except a border.

The Landscape Forty-seven per cent of Lombardy is the flat Po valley, 40 per cent is mountain along the Rhaetian Alps at the Swiss border, and only 12 per cent is hill — which is, predictably, where the wine is. The great lakes shape everything: Maggiore, Como, Iseo and Garda, all gouged out by Pleistocene glaciers and fringed at their southern ends by deep moraine. The climate is nominally semi-continental and in practice highly various, because the lakes moderate their surroundings and the mountains do the opposite.

Franciacorta The most important zone sits south of Lake Iseo near Brescia, bounded by the Oglio to the west and the isolated hill of Montorfano to the south. Geologically it is the conglomerate of an ancient submarine cone, with hills built partly of Mesozoic rock and partly of glacial deposits from the Iseo morainic amphitheatre — abundant rocky debris in a silty-sandy matrix, which drains beautifully. It also sits precisely on a climatic boundary, running east to west between the lake-moderated sublittoral zone and the Po valley proper, which is why its different parcels behave so differently.

Valtellina In the far north, in the province of Sondrio, the Adda has cut a valley that runs east to west rather than north to south — an accident of geology that turns its entire northern flank into a south-facing wall. Vines occupy terraces between 300 and 700 metres on alluvial and glacial fans, with medium-deep sandy loam over a metamorphic bedrock of schist and gneiss. The climate is endo-alpine and unusually dry. This is heroic viticulture in the literal sense: the terraces are held by dry-stone walls, worked by hand, and cost more to farm than the wine can easily repay.

Older Than Rome The southern shore of Lake Garda has been inhabited since the late Neolithic, and the pile-dwelling settlements at Rivarolo Mantovano and Valeggio sul Mincio have yielded material going back to 3980 BC. At Bande di Cavriana, in the lake’s morainic ring, late Bronze Age agricultural traces came up alongside quantities of wild grape seeds, and Iron Age finds include seeds of Vitis vinifera itself — which establishes that wine was being made here well before the Romans arrived in the second century BC.

The Grapes Chardonnay and Pinot Nero, with Pinot Bianco and now a little of the revived local Erbamat, make Franciacorta. Nebbiolo, called Chiavennasca here, makes Valtellina and its dried-grape Sforzato. Croatina, Barbera, Uva Rara and Vespolina carry the Oltrepò Pavese, alongside the largest planting of Pinot Nero in Italy. Turbiana — Verdicchio under another name — makes Lugana on the Garda shore, Groppello makes the light reds of the Valtènesi, and Moscato di Scanzo, from a few hectares near Bergamo, is one of the smallest DOCGs in the country.

The Critical Take Franciacorta is very good and priced accordingly; it competes with Champagne on cost without Champagne’s name, which is a hard commercial position and has kept it mostly domestic. Valtellina deserves far more attention than it gets: Nebbiolo here is paler, higher-toned and more alpine than anything in Piedmont, and the best bottles are a fraction of Barolo’s price. The Oltrepò Pavese is the frustration — around 15,000 hectares, the largest zone in the region, sitting on Italy’s biggest Pinot Nero resource, and still without a coherent identity. Much of its best fruit leaves in tank to become somebody else’s sparkling wine.

At the Table Risotto alla milanese and ossobuco, casoncelli from Bergamo, pizzoccheri of buckwheat pasta with cabbage and cheese in Valtellina, bresaola, and a cheeseboard that includes Gorgonzola, Taleggio and Grana Padano. Sforzato with aged cheese is the regional argument-ender.

Where to Start A Franciacorta Satèn or non-vintage brut, then a Valtellina Superiore from Sassella or Inferno, then a Sforzato if the mountain style appeals.