About Franciacorta

 

Based on Franciacorta.wine

The name Franciacorta conjures up a distant past suffused with a mystery which local people love to speculate about. The most plausible theory is that the area’s history is bound up with the presence of Cluniac and Cistercian monks who came to Franciacorta from Cluny in the 11th century. They were very powerful monasteries which reclaimed and farmed vast swathes of land in the area and thus succeeded in obtaining exemption from customs in around the year 1100. These lands were Francae Curtes, that is, lands free of taxes. Francae Curtes led to Franzacurta which was mentioned for the first time in the Brescia communal archives in 1277.  

Franciacorta’s history is a very long one with deep roots in an area in which vines have been a constant. From the Roman era to late antiquity and up to the apex of the Middle Ages soil and climate favoured vine growing.

It was the interplay between Franciacorta’s history, wine and culture that produced one of the world’s first books on naturally bottle fermented winemaking techniques and their effects on the human body. Printed in Italy in 1570, the book was written by Brescia doctor Girolamo Conforti and significantly entitled Libellus de vino mordaci. This doctor, whose studies preceded those of illustrious abbot Dom Perignon, illustrates the widespread dissemination and consumption of wines with bubbles at the time, wines which he called ‘mordaci’, i.e. lively and frothy.
And there’s more. He also applied his tasting expertise to his descriptions of them, going as far as to judge them ‘tangy and lively tasting wines which do not dry out the mouth in the way acerbic and austere wines do and do not soften the tongue like sweet wines’, before going on to list their therapeutic effects. For Conforti – also a connoisseur of French wines – the bubbles in Franciacorta wines increased in winter before decreasing and subsiding as the summer went by.
The bubbles were thus caused by the boiling of the must or rather its fermentation which was to be controlled, even then, to ensure that its ‘light, tangy gassy emissions’ were not lost.
These erudite considerations may well have been the basis for the earliest sparkling Franciacorta winemakers deciding to use barley to accentuate and prolong fermentation.

A Napoleon era survey in 1809 provides a snapshot of the over one thousand hectares of land then specialising in making ‘mordaci’ wines and a similar number of hectares of vineyards mixed with other crops. The years that followed saw winemaking growing constantly until it long outstripped local demand and generated the first wine sale businesses. This was the state of affairs in which, in the early 1960s, young oenologist Franco Ziliani made the first Pinot di Franciacorta vintage, thus triggering the production of the first ante litteram amateur sparkling wines, the predecessors to Franciacorta’s modern, codified winemaking. 

In the wake of the first Protected Designation of Origin appellation in 1967, in 1995 Franciacorta became the first Italian wine made with a second fermentation in the bottle to achieve Protected and Guaranteed Designation of Origin (DOCG) status. The name on today’s labels is Franciacorta, a single word which conjures up geography, production method and wine.