I know a trick question when I hear one. “Red or rosé?” Gabriele Cristini asked as he proffered a plate of slow-cooked beef on a bed of polenta. The answer was so obviously, so screamingly “red” that I smelt a rat. Then he whipped out a bottle from behind him — not just any rosé, but sparkling! — and popped the cork alongside my prejudices. Turns out melt-in-mouth meat and palate-cleaning fizz is an unlikely but heavenly match.

Italy is notoriously a land of food rules: no cappuccino after midday, no chicken with pasta, no parmesan on fish — and certainly no pink bubbles with a juicy slab of manzo. But here in Franciacorta, in eastern Lombardy, about an hour northeast from Milan — where Cristini is the chef at Corte Lantieri, a family-owned winery, restaurant and elegant B&B — the normal rules don’t apply. This is the land of sparkling wine and, because this is Italy, there’s a sparkling wine for every course, feeling and every occasion.

There’s the regular brut, of course, and extra brut. There might be dosaggio zero — where no sugar has been added to the sparkling process, so you can really taste the grape beneath the bubbles. You might have a millesimato — grapes from a particularly good harvest that have been aged on lees for at least 30 months. And then there’s something you won’t find anywhere else in the world: satèn, whose bubbles are smaller, softer — a mouthful of cream instead of gas, thanks to a lower bottle pressure.

Italy’s “prosecco hills” of Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia, to the east, disgorged more than 616 million bottles in 2023 compared with Franciacorta’s 19.5 million. But comparing Franciacorta and prosecco (which is made predominantly from glera grapes) is like comparing rubies with costume jewellery. The corks both pop; the glasses both fizz. But in the mouth, Franciacorta is a softer, more elegant wine — as complex as the area from which it comes. For those of us who find prosecco too sweet and champagne too expensive, it’s a sparkling Goldilocks — just right.

Sandwiched between Brescia and Bergamo, a landscape whittled by the glacier that hollowed out neighbouring Lake Iseo, Franciacorta isn’t, at first glance, the Italy that launched a thousand coffee-table books. Instead of Piedmont’s rolling hills it’s relatively flat; where Chianti is dotted with delectable Renaissance villages Franciacorta’s ancient towns are interwoven with modern development. This is the industrial Po Valley, so there are McDonald’s, strip malls, even a motorway slashing through the middle. Arriving can be befuddling — where’s the bel paese? And then you emerge from an industrial estate into a landscape of primeval beauty: Iseo’s icy blues scything through hulking Alpine peaks, a graceful rumple of vine-plaited fields, a campanile straining heavenward. It’s so startlingly gorgeous that you need a glass of wine to recover.

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That’s the view, anyway, around Berlucchi, the winery where all this started. In the 1950s a young enologist, Franco Ziliani, sat down with Guido Berlucchi, who was hoping to supercharge his vineyard — for centuries, Franciacorta had been known for its middle-of-the-road reds. Ziliani had an idea: what if they tried a sparkling white, French-style? By 1961 they’d produced 3,000 bottles of pinot di Franciacorta, one of which today sits dramatically spotlit in a gated cell in Berlucchi’s 17th-century cellar.

Their instant success got the neighbours ripping out their old vines and replanting with chardonnay and pinot bianco. Today Franciacorta DOCG is considered one of the strictest appellations on the planet, with rigorous geographical and grape regulation, and a tightly policed traditional (ie champenoise — where the wine gets a second, bubble-inducing fermentation in the bottle) sparkling method.

What’s lovelier — and here is the bel paese at work — is that the producers are mostly families. Even the behemoth Berlucchi, which produces almost a quarter of Franciacorta’s wine, is run by Ziliani’s three children: Arturo, Paolo and Cristina, who poured me a silky satèn. “We want people to leave here not saying, ‘I drank a glass of prosecco from Franciacorta,’” she said archly (tastings from £28; berlucchi.it).

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I visited Berlucchi at the urging of Giorgio Faccoli, a 24-year-old vintner whose family was one of the first to follow Ziliani in 1963 (that’s another nice thing about Franciacorta — they all support each other). The Faccoli vineyards (tastings £38; faccolifranciacorta.it) unspool along Monte Orfano — Franciacorta’s only peak at 452m. The Po Valley’s most ancient rocky outcrop, it births particularly minerally wines — “ruffiano”, Giorgio said, which needs no translation — and the family amp up the taste by dialling down the sugar. It was an acquired taste, he warned, but a delicious one, earthy and rocky. Nearby, at Caruna (tastings £21; carunafranciacorta.com), I joined locals on a birthday outing as our guide Federica poured us yeasty proto-wine straight from the vat and the enologist-to-be Sofia (Caruna, of course) uncorked the dangerously smooth satèn.

On the other side of Franciacorta — in Ome, in the concertina hills below Lake Iseo — I returned to an old favourite, Al Rocol (tastings with lunch from £29; alrocol.com). Land farmed for generations by the Vimercati family is now a vineyard and agriturismo, where the siblings Francesca and Gianluigi produce not only sparkling wines but also the dry reds and whites of their nonni. I basked in the autumn sun with a pure dolce vita lunch: stuffed casoncelli pasta swimming in butter with a snowdrift of parmesan on top, plus lashings of vino. Afterwards Gianluigi drove me into the hills to see the 15th-century frescoes and 17th-century Venetian graffiti in the tiny church of San Michele, which his nonna had saved from demolition in the 1960s (Via S. Michele 17). “This is a beautiful area but it’s barely known,” he said as we looked at Franciacorta unfurling beneath us.

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He’s right — scratch the surface and modern Franciacorta polishes into a gem. In Ome, the centuries rolled back as the blacksmiths Angelo and Dario fired up a 1400s smithy, powered by a mighty water-stoked wheel (£4, weekend demonstrations March-November; visitlakeiseo.info). Nearby in Rodengo Saiano, at the Abbazia Olivetana San Nicola, a white-robed monk smiled beneficently as I wafted through his frescoed cloisters (free; visitlakeiseo.info). And atop Monte Orfano, at the Convento dell’Annunciata, I lit a candle in the church then sat on the sun-soaked loggia to taste the dry, highly aromatic chardonnay — planted by past monks and now cultivated by Bellavista, a local winery that runs the convent as a hotel (tour and tasting £21; conventoannunciatafranciacorta.it). That night I sidled west to sleep in yet another monastery — Cappuccini Resort, built on Monte Orfano in 1569 by Capuchin monks, abandoned, and lovingly restored into a heavenly eyrie by the owner Rosalba Tonelli. Swirling mist below us blotted out the modern world as I feasted on lake-swiped fish and her homegrown veg and wine — just as the monks would have done.

In Capriolo, cobbled, squeeze-belly streets took me ever higher to the castle topping the medieval village, the vineyards of Corte Lantieri splaying out below. The noble Lantieri family moved here in the 1500s when they were exiled from their lakeside castle at nearby Paratico by the conquering Venetians. “It was lucky we were sent here in a way, because we started producing wine,” Gaia Lantieri said, showing me the upturned bottles fermenting in their 1600s cellar. Back then, their red wine made it to the courts of Milan, Ferrara and Mantua; today, their refined bubbles are winning medals, and Cristini, with his wine-paired meals, is rearranging the taste buds of guests like me (tastings from £15; lantierideparatico.it). Modern but traditional, understated but elegant — Champagne may have châteaux, but my heart is with Franciacorta’s dolce vita.
Julia Buckley was a guest of Corte Lantieri, which has B&B doubles from £125 (cortelantieri.it); and Cappuccini Resort, which has B&B doubles from £158 (cappuccini.it). Fly to Verona or Milan Linate