New Releases from Emilia-Romagna: Something For Everyone

BY IAN D'AGATA | JANUARY 16, 2018

There’s much more to the wines of Emilia-Romagna than just Lambrusco. The region offers myriad wine grapes and styles that deserve to be better known. Mostly gentle pricing provides a strong incentive to get to know these underrated wines even better.

One of the cardinal maxims of wine is that hillsides make the best bottles. But there are plenty of flatland vineyards that perform remarkably well too. Italy’s Isonzo denomination and Alsace’s famous Clos de Capucins are examples of how the lowly plains can give delightful, even complex and memorable wines. Emilia-Romagna’s many wonderful wines made with the numerous Lambrusco varieties that live there are another example, and although they clearly are not the last word in complexity or concentration, they can offer easygoing fruit-driven flavors and refreshing mouth-cleansing acidity.

But Emilia-Romagna’s wines offer much more than simple entertainment value. The region boasts an incredible array of grape varieties and wine styles that offers something for everyone. Although little known outside the home region, Emilia-Romagna’s wines encompass dry and sweet whites, reds and sparklers made from literally dozens of grape varieties, many of which come from hillsides too (such as the wines called Colli di Parma or Colli Piacentini, for example.) International varieties are also well represented, but as is almost always the case in Italy, most of the excitement lies with the region’s native varieties, which produce wines that are not made anywhere else in the world.

A view at Medici Ermete

Getting to Know Emilia-Romagna’s Grape Varieties and Wines

While we tend to speak of the region called Emilia-Romagna, the areas of Emilia (which includes the cities of Parma, Bologna, Modena, Ferrara  and Reggio Emilia) and Romagna (where the cities of Rimini, Riccione, and Ravenna are located) have very different histories, geographies and wines. Emilia is the western half of the region. Its main grapes are the white Pignoletto and Malvasia Aromatica di Candia varieties and the red Lambruscos. Romagna’s most common white grape is Albana and its most widely planted red grape is Sangiovese. It follows that the two halves of Emilia-Romagna have very little in common, wine-wise.