Administrative area · Italy
Emilia-Romagna
The home of Lambrusco, and a large region whose food culture is better known than its wine.
About Emilia-Romagna
Lambrusco is a family of related dark-skinned varieties producing lightly sparkling red wine, dry to sweet. The dry versions, largely unknown outside Italy until recently, cut through the region’s rich cured meats and cheeses very effectively.
Romagna Sangiovese is a substantial category producing softer, earlier-drinking wines than Tuscany.
No authority delimits this name or attaches rules to it. A political unit — an Italian region, an English county, a US county — used as a wine area because that is how the industry and its readers talk about it, not because a wine authority delimited it. That does not make it less real or less useful — it means nothing legal follows from it, and you will not generally find it on a label as a controlled designation.
Grapes
Wines from here
Climate
Warm and humid on the Po plain, cooler in the Apennine foothills where the better vineyards sit.
These are influences on how a wine turns out, not determinants of it. Picking date, yield, vine age and every winemaking decision sit between the climate and the glass.
Soil and geology
Deep alluvial clay on the plain — fertile and high-yielding — with limestone and sand in the hills.
WineHQ describes soil in terms of what it demonstrably does — drainage, heat retention, water supply, rooting depth — and not in terms of flavours it is said to transmit. Vines take up ions, not aromas, and no mechanism has been demonstrated by which a mineral in the ground is tasted in the glass. See soil and drainage.
What to eat, and how to serve it
Derived from this region’s signature styles. Each is listed separately, because a region does not have one serving temperature.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Italian DOP and IGP wine register — Ministero dell’agricoltura, della sovranità alimentare e delle foreste (MASAF)