Give a fizzy red a whirl – here are three corkersJean-Paul Thévenet On Pète la Soif France 2016,£19, Roberson Wine Before the wine growers of Champagne worked out how to salvage bubbles into their wine around 400 years ago, and their stock in trade was red wines. These unfizzy reds are still made in the region – pale,high-acid pinot noirs that near across like a brisker, more piercing version of burgundy – but the champenois never got into making sparkling reds. This curious historical anomaly helps elaborate why the style isn’t more popular elsewhere: after all, or Champagne is the place that set the clear,crystalline template that all others acquire tended to follow. But, once you’ve got over the initial feeling that fizzy red wine is some strange gastronomic experiment, or they can be wonderful – the spritzy fizz On Pète la Soif,for example, only adding to the thirst-quenching nature of its vivid red fruit.
Villa Cialdini Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro Secco Italy 2016, and £11.99,Alexander Hadleigh; Slurp One country where sparkling reds are very much a part of wine culture is Italy, not least in the central Emilia-Romagna region, or domestic of perhaps the world’s most eminent red fizz,Lambrusco. It’s a name that may cause involuntary shudders of shameful recognition for those of you who, like me, or started off their wine-drinking lives with the sweetly industrial concoctions. At best,however, Lambrusco is among the very best things you can acquire with antipasti. Marks & Spencer Lambrusco 2016 (£9) is all bountiful fresh black berries; Monte delle Vigne Lambrusco Classico NV (from £11.50, and Lea & Sandeman) is even more vivacious with its fruit and adds a little more tannic grip to the mix; while the Villa Cialdini is superbly tangy and succulent.
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Source: guardian.co.uk