Barone Pizzini Winery

One of the wonderful opportunities on this trip is that we are meeting three different friends at three different places.  Our first meeting is with our next door neighbors from the U.S. who are expats from Milan working in the States for a few years.  They have been in Italy in August for holiday and our time overlapped by  couple of days.  Paolo loves sparkling wine, especially Italian sparkling wine, and he arranged for us to meet and visit a wonderful winery north of Rovato.  This was on the way to Marone where we were spending the rest of the day.

This winery is located in the Franciacorta area of northern Italy, home to Italy's sparkling wines.  Barone Pizzini was founded in 1870.  This was also the first winery in this area to go organic, which involved cleansing the land of all chemicals, and transforming all of the wine making processes to work in a chemical free way.  Today organic practices are becoming more common in this region.

The winery cultivates 47 hectares of land, which is divided into 25 separate areas, each with its own unique soil composition and weather conditions.  Three varieties of grapes are planted across these 25 areas and the wines are made from blending the grapes from these areas.  It is quite a complex process!

We enjoyed a very informative tour of the winery and a brief tour of one field of grapes, then the best part was the tasting.  A nice tables of aperitifs was set with three sparkling wines for us to enjoy. One interesting part of the experience was the specialLy designed wine glasses.  A sparkling wine will continuously bubble, and these glasses are designed with their feet angle to cause the bubbles to rise in a small column from the center of the glass.  It was really beautiful.  The wines were delicious and unique, and we enjoyed each one.

For all of the photos from the tour, check out the album in the Photo Library.