Winebits 475: Italian wine and sparkling wine

This week’s wine news: The Italians regained the top spot as the word’s biggest wine producing country in 2016, plus sparkling wine in France and England

• No. 1: Italy became the world leader in wine production during 2016, according to the Italian farmers association Coldiretti. Italy, Spain, and France take turns producing the most wine in the world; the Spanish have been first the past couple of year. Also worth noting: Italian wine exports to the Champagne region of France grew 57 percent last year. If the story in the link is correct, this meant that people in Champagne were buying Prosecco, the Italian sparkling wine. This raises all sorts of Python-esque questions, especially given the Champagne region’s take no prisoners attitude toward other sparkling wine.

• Sparkling legal battle: What happens when two French wine regions disagree about who should be allowed to make sparkling wine (and neither of them is Champagne, to continue our Python theme)? There is a lawsuit, of course. Wink Lorch at Wine-Searcher.com reports that the Clairette de Die appellation has been given permission to make rose sparkling wine using a little known technique called methode ancestrale. This has drawn the ire of the Bugey-Cerdon appellation, which is currently the only region allowed to make rose sparkling using methode ancestrale. Not to worry if you’ve never heard of methode ancestrale or either region; Lorcher says very people in France have. The dispute, in fact, may not be about those regions or the technique as much as it is about establishing a precedent to allow better known appellations, like Beaujolais, to make methode ancestral rose sparkling.

• It’s good to be the queen: The Queen of England has sold out her winery’s first release of sparkling wine. This is newsworthy because it’s English wine, and there isn’t that much of it; second, because it shows English bubbly has overcome many of the obstacles facing regional wine regardless of where it’s from; and third, because the article includes a quote from someone who didn’t taste the wine saying how wonderful it is. And people wonder why there will always be an England.