The first Franciacorta Vineyard and Zone Map based was presented
19.5 million bottles sold in a year puts Franciacorta top of the Italian champagne method wines rankings in production and positioning terms.
It is incontrovertible success which has not stopped Franciacorta and its producers from looking beyond it in an attempt to imagine and build a Franciacorta for future generations too, one which sees the local area as not just a promotion tool but as a way of strengthening the denomination’s identity and embarking on new challenges.
Three years of quiet work have now culminated in the first Franciacorta Vineyard and Zone Mapbased on the expertise of Alessandro Masnaghetti, world famous journalist and cartographer, who produced accurate and meticulous mapping of 134 zones within the denomination designed to find the right balance between detail, zone coverage, history and tradition. No attempt has been made to classify the Franciacorta zones, with the idea being finally to identify and promote homogeneous areas in landscape, history, toponym and thus, once again, tradition terms.
As Alessandro Masnaghetti has noted: “Promoting a wine can and must include enhancing the area and it is impossible to enhance the area without identifying and regulating its names and places.And Franciacorta has been able to base this field work on indisputable historical foundations.”
In fact Franciacorta is the first in Italy, thanks to the work of the late lamented Paolo Oscar, to have succeeded in digitalising the Napoleonic land register in its area, the register which was the cornerstone for Burgundy’s lieux-dits and which, in Franciacorta, supplied generally accurate and indispensable data on the toponyms used in the map.
But the map is not ‘just’ history, tradition and toponyms. It is also an attempt, on the basis of the text published on the back of the map itself, to describe Franciacorta in a way which is as simple as it is effective, with a view to finally generating a common language in describing the denomination. From geology – setting aside often difficult to decipher technical jargon and focusing on the more evident and specific aspects – to the landscape, supplying clear and precise geographical references which enable everyone to ‘read’ the denomination directly on the field. Because we believe Franciacorta deserves to be seen and loved.
responsibly