Tax Free Franciacorta

Today, Franciacorta is Italy’s leading area for sophisticated, dry sparkling wines made by the traditional (Champagne) method. At their best, these are austerely elegant sparklers with a fine, creamy mousse of bubbles. The region is now home to a number of prestigious sparkling wine firms. Historically, however, Franciacorta was a fairly bucolic place, replete with convents and monasteries. The name Franciacorta is said to derive from the region’s towns–curtes in dialect–which were exempt–francae–from taxes during the Middle Ages. The name, first used in the 1200s, was probably adopted because the monasteries in the region were given tax breaks for reviving agriculture. The name wasn’t applied to wine until the 1970s.

The Sonoma wine region is known as the “Valley of the Sun.”

Answer: False.

Sonoma is also sometimes known as the “Valley of the Moon.” Before the Spanish missionaries arrived in the early nineteenth century, Native Americans had lived in the Sonoma Valley for over 12,000 years. Legend has it that Sonoma derives from an indigenous word meaning “many moons.” Sometime in the 1840s, General Mariano G. Vallejo, who was the Mexican commander in the area, translated the term from a local Native American tribe, believing it to roughly translate to “valley of the moon.” The name stuck.

1882

Year the first major traditional method (méthode champenoise) sparkling wine began to be made in California—specifically in Sonoma’s Russian River Valley. The producer, Korbel Champagne Cellars, had been founded a few years earlier by three… Continue reading

Tax Free Franciacorta

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