Vittorio Graziano, Fontana dei Boschi Lambrusco

THIS IS WHAT Lambrusco should be like, and once upon a time was. These days nearly all Lambrusco is industrial. Vittorio Graziano prefers to go in the other direction: instead of massive yields from irrigated, battery-chicken vineyards, he has much lower yields (one bottle per vine) from unirrigated vines on the hills. Instead of high-volume, low-cost fermentation techniques he uses what he terms the ‘metodo ancestrale’, which involves wild yeasts, fermenting the juice on the skins for three or four days to get colour, bottling in the spring with a bit of sugar and yeast and leaving it in bottle to continue its fermentation to dryness. Eighteen months’ or two years’ ageing on the lees gives more complexity. Some is then disgorged off the lees, which means the wine pours clear. Some is not, and is sold sur lie, and therefore is potentially cloudy. It tastes totally different like this: less fruit, more weight. You can have two wines in one bottle.

This is real artisan wine: wild, unpredictable, tasting of savoury blackberries and herbs, with high acidity, a touch of green, and a bit of tannic grip.

Unlike industrial Lambrusco, it ages beautifully. Of course it does: it’s authentic wine, made as Lambrusco used to be made before the lure of mass production and cost-cutting.

For a while Graziano was the only one making artisan Lambrusco; now a few others have joined in. It’ll be a cult one of these days.