Contadi Castaldi Franciacorta Rose Brut NV

Winery: Contadi Castaldi

Varietal: Champagne Blend

The sparkling wines of Champagne have been revered by wine drinkers for hundreds of years, and even today they maintain their reputation for excellence of flavor and character, and are consistently associated with quality, decadence, and a cause for celebration. Their unique characteristics are partly due to the careful blending of a small number of selected grape varietals, most commonly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. These grapes, blended in fairly equal quantities, give the wines of Champagne their wonderful flavors and aromas, with the Pinot Noir offering length and backbone, and the Chardonnay varietal giving its acidity and dry, biscuity nature. It isn't unusual to sometimes see Champagne labeled as 'blanc de blanc', meaning it is made using only Chardonnay varietal grapes, or 'blanc de noir', which is made solely with Pinot Noir.

Region: Lombardy

Lombardy, in north west Italy, has been home to many of the country's finest white wines for centuries, and steadily built up a reputation for excellence as a result of the exceedingly high quality, dry and crisp white wines which are produced there. The primary grape varietal associated with Lombardy is the wonderful Trebbiano di Laguna, a noble subspecies of the Trebbiano grape, which, as the name suggests, grows extremely well on the shores of the beautiful and much visited Lake Garda. However, recent years have seen plenty of experimentation when it comes to grape varietals, and many wineries in the Lombardy region now grow all manner of French Bordeaux grapes, including Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, which are used to make superb red wines.

Country: Italy

For several decades in the mid to late twentieth century, Italy's reputation for quality wines took a fairly serious blow. This was brought about partly due to lack of regulation in certain regions, and too much regulation in others. This led to several wineries in the beautiful and highly fertile region of Tuscany making the bold move to work outside of the law, which they saw as responsible for the drop in quality in Tuscan wines. They believed that they had the expertise and the generations of experience necessary with which to make truly excellent, world class wines, and set about doing just that. These 'Super Tuscans', as they came to be known, quickly inspired the rest of Italy to improve their produce, and now, Italian wine producers in the twenty-first century are widely recognised to be amongst the best in the world. Regulation and law began to change, and wine drinkers across the globe woke up to the outstanding wines coming out of Italy, which are continuing to improve and impress to this day.