The Wine Pair Podcast

Holiday Sparkling Wines #5: Lambrusco!

• The Wine Pair • Season 1 • Episode 196

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Forget what you think you know about Lambrusco, because this wine slaps! We walked away from this episode with one of our very few 10/10 rated wines! If you are looking for something fun, festive, and delicious to add to your Holiday table or bring as a special gift, Lambrusco is the answer! For many years, Lambrusco was the top selling imported wine in the United States, but it did not come with a great reputation. It was known as a sweet “soda-pop” wine, but today, great winemakers are making serious, gastronomic, and wonderful wines. We found these wines to be great food wines that would go with any part of the meal, from charcuterie through the main meal all the way to dessert, and would also be fantastic cocktail wines. It is hard for us to express how much fun we had in this episode and how much we liked the Lambrusco we drank. This wine is a must-have for your next Holiday celebration. Wines reviewed in this episode: Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco, 2024 Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena Premium Secco

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Show Notes

Episode #196: Holiday Sparkling Wines #5: Lambrusco!  00:00

Howdy Paired Nerds! And welcome to The Wine Pair Podcast. I’m Joe, your sommelier of reasonably priced wine, and this is my wife and my wine pairing partner in crime, Carmela. And we are The Wine Pair!

If you are new to our podcast, here is what you can expect. If you love wine and want to find great wines at affordable prices, and you want to expand your wine horizons, and you want to have some laughs and fun while doing it - then you are in the right place! Each week we explore a different wine varietal, style, brand, or region of the winemaking world, and learn about what makes them worth knowing about. And then we taste 2-3 of those wines that are reasonably priced to let you know if they are worth your hard earned money. If that feels like your vibe, then we are super happy you are here. And, we are proud to say that Decanter Magazine calls us fun, irreverent, chatty, and entertaining.

Carmela, we are staying in Italy for another week, but heading north from Sicily where we were last week and into the Emilia-Romagna area to talk about the red sparkling wine called Lambrusco. Because we are heading very quickly into Christmas and New Years and Hanukkah and other winter celebrations, it is very appropriate that we once again look at sparkling wines, because hardly anything says the Holidays like sparkling wine. I mean, sparkling wine is fun, it feels like a celebration, and a red sparkling wine is just dramatic. We talked about sparkling Shiraz - also a red sparkling - last year, which we really liked, and we have done an episode where we included Lambrusco, but we have never done an episode just on Lambrusco.

And, if you go back into our catalog of episodes, we have several sparkling wine episodes from past Holiday periods as well as from around the 4th of July if you want to learn more about things like Cremant, American sparkling wines, sparkling roses, and other fun stuff. And we have some great choices if you are interested from those previous episodes, one of which we are going to drink in our virtual wine tasting this week- so if you still want to join us, send me an email at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com and I will get you the details. We are doing the virtual tasting at 5:30 PM Pacific this Thursday the 18th of December, and that is 2025 if you are joining us on this episode from the future.

But before that, we have a few things to do, starting with having a conversation with Dave Baxter who has our name for the tribe this week, and has his own wine podcast that we are going to join him on in about a month. So, let’s head over to our chat with Dave and you can hear all about it.

Interview with listener Dave Baxter who gave us our tribe name this week! 04:05

It was great to talk to Dave who, by the way, sometimes acts as our personal corrector because he is willing to give us the hard truth when we bring up something that is not totally correct. In the kindest way possible. And look for us to be on his podcast Vintertainment in about a month.

Please keep those tribe names coming, just send me an email with your name, and don’t worry if you think it is not good enough because it is! And we will see if you want to join us on the pod! It is so fun to get to talk to you all and get to know you and see and hear who is on the other side of the speaker. And, we promise that it will be really fun and really easy, and I am a really good editor - I’ll cut out all of the parts you don’t like!
 
Ok, Carmela, we still have some Lambrusco to edumacate ourselves on and find out what all the hype is about this sparkling red wine, but we have one more thing we need to get to, because we have this breaking news just coming in . . . .

WIne in the news this week: Grand Cru Gang Finally Faces Trial 10:14

Our wine in the news this week article comes from WineSearcher.com and was written by Oliver Styles and you can find the link to the article in our show notes, which Carmela knows we have. https://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2025/11/grand-cru-gang-finally-faces-trial The title of the article is Grand Cru Gang Finally Faces Trial.

Now, we should note that this is a different Grand Cru than our tribe, ok. We have no thieves among you, our listeners, we are sure.  For a little background on this story, evidently between 2019 and 2020, this crew of 12 people in France (including five Chinese nationals) allegedly stole over €3 million worth of wine. And not just any wine, but the biggies. They were going after wines like Petrus, Cheval Blanc, Château Margaux, and Romanée-Conti. 

According to the article, the police say they were highly sophisticated, using stolen vans, hitting warehouses in the dead of night, and then selling the stolen wine through restaurants in Paris and buyers in China. It was a massive operation.

As if that was not bad enough, the alleged ringleader is a 34-year-old career criminal from the local area who is standing trial not just for robbing the wineries, but for aggravated assault and armed robbery for - get this - robbing his own robbery crew. If there’s one thing you can learn from this podcast and put in your brain box is that you just can’t trust criminals anymore! 

Apparently, after the gang successfully sold some stolen wine to some Chinese buyers involved in the ring, there was a handover of cash, but instead of splitting up the booty, that’s what some people call cash, booty,  the ringleader allegedly turned a gun on his own accomplices and robbed them. Talk about a toxic work environment!

The police eventually caught these guys because the operation got sloppy. When they raided the ringleader’s home, they found stolen bottles of Petrus and Romanée-Conti just sitting there. I mean, c’mon. Dumb.

The trial started at the end of November after years of delays, and the prosecutor is asking for a 10-year prison sentence for the ringleader, and sentences between 8 years and 1-3 years for the rest of the cru/crew.

So, Carmela, some questions for you:
What role would you be if we put together a crew of thieves? Are you the ringleader, the getaway driver, or the person who sells the  stolen goods?
If you stole some really expensive wine, where would you hide it? Because hopefully you would do a better job than this fool.

But we are not here to talk about a group of wine thieves or a ringleader who turns on his fellow thieves. No. We are here to talk about the sparkling red wine Lambrusco, and we have two reasonably priced Lambruscos to taste and review to see if they should land at your Holiday celebrations . . . 

But first . . . we have to do our shameless plug.

Thank you for listening to us and for supporting our show, and remember, we buy all of our own wine so that we can give you real and honest reviews, and we do all of the writing and recording and editing to  bring you a show every week because we love you all, and all we ask you for in return is that you please follow or subscribe to our podcast and also please leave us a nice rating and review  to help us grow our listeners - and a huge thank you to all of you who have done so already! 

You can also follow us on Instagram at thewinepairpodcast, and on Bluesky. You can contact us on our website thewinepairpodcast.com, and you can sign up for our email newsletter there and you can also visit our “Shop Wine” section where you can find links to buy the wines that we rate as buys in each episode. 

And we want to make content you care about and you like, so send us a note or DM us - we always respond - and give us some feedback or let us know if there are wines you want us to try or wine making areas of the world you are curious about - and we’ll take care of it! joe@thewinepairpodcast.com

And, we will repeat our big announcement that we are going to be doing a virtual tasting on the 18th of this month because that is what we have gotten people reaching out to us about, so if you want to join us, send me a note at joe@thewinepairpodcast.com and we’ll send you the Zoom link and the wines we are going to drink and all that fun stuff so you can hang out with us and other super dope folks in our wine tribe. Several people are signed up, so hoping you can join us!

And, as we do every week, we’ll tell you someone we think you should recommend The Wine Pair Podcast to - because the best way for us to grow listeners is when you tell your family and friends about us - and this week, we want you to recommend us to anyone who is looking for a really fun wine to break out this Holiday season, one that people will be really interested in and will love, because they might dig this episode!

RESEARCH ARTICLES AND LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE


Topic: WTF is Lambrusco? 17:50

Carmela, let’s learn about just what the eff Lambrusco is, anyway, shall we?

As we mentioned, Lambrusco is a sparkling red wine from the Emilia-Romagna area of Italy, which, if you want to know is where Bologna is and Ravenna and Parma and Modena. But Lambrusco is actually not just one thing. It is the name given to a very large family of grapes, from what I read there are over 60 different kinds, but most winemakers only use a few, and you will sometimes find one of these names on the bottle:

  • Sorbara - which makes a lighter, pinker wine and is said to smell very aromatic, like flowers
  • Grasparossa - which makes a darker and bolder wine with a lot of tannin, and is said to have flavors of blackberries
  • Salamino - which is somewhere in the middle in terms of acidity and tannins. It produces a deep ruby wine with flavors of tart plums or cherries or raspberries, and gets its name because it looks like little salamis. That’s not a joke.


Lambrusco Salamino is the most common and widely planted variety of the family. Most Lambrusco is a blend of the different varieties, but there is a strong trend toward creating single varietal wines. They do allow a grape called Ancellotta into the Lambrusco blend - depending on the DOC or legal requirements they are allowed to add up to 15% - and that grape can help with color and sugar to help with fermentation. I am not going to into it, but different DOCs have different requirements for what percent the blend has to be.

Lambrusco has been around for a long time, what scientists would technically call a long-ass time. Lambrusco dates back to the Bronze Age, approximately 3300 B.C. The name Lambrusco is believed to have come from the Latin word labrusco which means wild vine, and historians think this is likely because the vines were originally found growing wild and climbing trees like vines.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the Etruscans were the first to domesticate and cultivate the grape. By the time the Romans came along, the grape was already highly valued for its productivity and high yields. The grape and wine were mentioned in writings from Cato the Elder and Pliny the Elder, so there were lots of elders writing about it.

Cultivation of the grape continued through the Middle Ages, and the wine gained recognition in the 1500s. Evidently, some dude named Andrea Bacci, who was the doctor of Pope Sixtus V talked about the wine.Put that in your brain box and save it for a party! Always good to have a doctor that likes wine.

In the 1700s, winemaking techniques improved that allowed winemakers to better manage the wine's bubbles, and by the second half of the 1800s they were really getting it down. So, here’s the scoop. When wines ferment, they create carbon dioxide. In normal winemaking, that CO2 dissipates in the fermentation process creating a still wine, but if you can close up the container the wine is fermenting in, you get the bubbles to stay. Natural carbonation.

There are two ways in the Lambrusco world that they generally trap those bubbles, which are different than how they make Champagne-style sparkling wines. These different styles also create a different kind of bubble experience. In Champagne, you get higher-pressure, tiny bubbles, but in Lambrusco, you get more of a fizzy, frothier, almost foamy experience - in fact, this style of bubbles in Italian is called Frizzante, and fizzy is a great way to think about it.

Most Lambrusco makers either use the Charmat method or the Ancestral Method to get the bubbles to stick around. I will note that they also use the Charmat method for Prosecco. In the Charmat Method, the wine is put into a pressurized tank and yeast and sugar are added for a second fermentation and the tank traps the bubbles. In the Ancestral Method, which is seeing a resurgence and many artisanal winemakers are using, the wine is bottled while it is going through its first fermentation and the yeast stays in the bottle when it has done its job, and so you get a really earthy, funky, and fizzy wine. This is basically what Pét-Nat is, and we have had one we really love called Radice Lambrusco di Sorbara.

Once we hit the 20th century there was a dramatic shift in Lambrusco's production and reputation, mostly impacted by a move toward mass production and high yields. In the 1970s and 1980s, sweet Lambrusco became the biggest-selling import wine in the United States, reaching a peak of 11.5 million cases sold in 1985. The most famous brand was “Riunite” and old people like us remember the "Riunite on Ice, That’s Nice" marketing campaign.

But this growth in popularity came with a price because it led to the production of cheap, overly sweet versions of the wine. As a result, critics and consumers began to refer to it as the "Coca-Cola of wines," considering it a sweet, fizzy, cheap, and unserious wine. Which it kind of has gotten stuck with even to today.

However, since the 1990s, producers have worked  to save its reputation, creating artisanal versions of the wine, dry or less sweet versions of the wine, lowering yields, and improving quality. Along with the Ancestral Method, some producers are even playing with the Traditional or Champagne Method of production. Overall, just to warn you, you will most likely find that this wine is going to be on the sweeter side. So be warned.

And, in January 2021, various grower associations united to form the Consorzio Tutela Lambrusco, a single body dedicated to protecting and promoting the quality of Lambrusco DOC wines. So, while there is still some crap on the market, and there is still a hangover effect of the crummy wine that was being produced in the 70’s and 80’s, today many are finding Lambrusco to be a more serious wine, a gastronomic wine, if you will, meant to be savored with foods - and, if you know about the Emilia-Romagna area of Italy, that is were some of the most famous Italian foods come from like the pastas tagliatelle and tortellini, cured meats like Prosciutto and Mortadella, Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, traditional balsamic vinegar, and ragù alla bolognese.

And that is why we are talking about it today, because it is a great, fun, and festive wine to serve with Holiday meals and parties.

But that’s enough information. I think it’s time to learn a little more about the specific wines we are drinking today. Whaddya say?


Lambrusco Wines We Chose for This Episode 29:00

As usual, the wines we have chosen for this episode are under $25, and they should be relatively easy to find because I bought them both at wine.com. Now you should have no trouble finding Lambrusco. Most grocery stores with decent wine selections will have them. The challenge will be finding one that is not crap. The price point is a good place to start, and the alcohol content is another place to look. I would avoid any Lambrusco below 11% alcohol. And see if you can find Lambruscos that are very specific about the grapes they are using. Also, look for Lambrusco with corks and cages, or with bottle caps if they are in the pet-nat style. Honestly, the bottle caps are a better indicator of quality than a screw cap in this case. As always, ask your local wine merchant to source you some good stuff if you can’t find any. 

The first wine we are going to drink today is the Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco. This wine is made from 100% Lambrusco Salamino, the one that looks like little salamis and is supposed to be a balanced wine. This wine has gotten a 92 from a publication called the Somm Journal which has a good reputation and is specifically made for, as you would guess, wine professionals. It also got a surprising 90 from James Suckling. 

This wine is 11% alcohol, and so is considered off-dry, meaning a bit on the sweet side but should not be cloying, and you may find similarly sweet wines sometimes called semi-sweet, semi-dry, Feinherb in German, or Tendre in French. Remember, in sparkling wine, brut is what you would normally consider dry or low in sugar, and dry is when you have a little more residual sugar, which is always confusing.

The tech sheet for the wine says they use the Espalier (es-pal-yer) vine training system which is a way of training grapevines to grow flat along a wall or fence, and it often has a two tiered look. Growers train the vine’s branches to grow sideways along wires so the plant looks neat and organized. This helps get more sunlight to the grapes and leaves, gives better airflow to prevent disease and rot, makes it easier to harvest, and some say it just looks pretty.

The winery says they use the short Charmat system which means they only keep the wine in the tank for a couple of months. The wine also has 16 grams of residual sugar which would put it in the extra dry category if you are trying to compare it to something like Prosecco which is often extra dry (and why I have become tired of it). This wine is also certified organic if that is important to you. 

The next wine we are going to drink is the 2024 Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena Premium Secco, so right off the bat it has a vintage which is uncommon in less expensive sparkling wines. The winery says this wine is in the brut range with minimal detectable sweetness, but it comes in at 11% alcohol, so I am a bit suspicious of that and think it will be sweeter. 

The winery also says that they train the vines in the Geneva Double Curtain system which has some similarities to the Espalier system, but in this method, the vines grow upward and then split into two hanging sides that creates, as the name would imply, what looks like curtains of grapes vines and leaves and grapes. It is often used in large commercial vineyards and it also improves sunlight and airflow to the grapes and makes them easier to manage. 

They also say they use a phytosanitary defense with integrated pest management which is a fancy way of saying they try and use sprays as a last resort to control pests, but use other methods like introducing good insects, pruning and spacing well, and stuff like that. 

This wine is also a single varietal, but in this case is 100% Lambrusco di Sorbara which is supposed to be the lighter version, so we’ll see how much difference we can tell between these two wines. This wine also got a 93 rating from Wilfred Wong who is the wine.com reviewer. 

They also say they cold macerate the grapes and use only free-run juice holding it at cold temperatures until it is fermented, and they make the wine in batches several times during the year. They also use the short Charmat method, aging it for only 2 months in the pressurized tanks and then just one month in the bottle before getting it to market. 


But, I think that is enough information - I think we need to taste these wines to see what we think, if they should appear at you next Holiday party, and if we can tell the difference between them! 

We’ll take a quick break and be right back. And, if you have these wines or similar wines, drink along with us to get some participation points, which you can trade-in for free stickers. You just need to send me an email with your mailing address, and I will get those “I drink with The Wine Pair Podcast” stickers over to you!


LINKS TO SOURCES FOR THESE SPECIFIC WINES



Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco, 2024 Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena Premium Secco Wine Tasting, Pairing, and Review 34:25

Wine: Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco
Region: Italy, Emilia-Romagna
Year: NV
Price: $17.97
Retailer: wine.com
Alcohol: 11.5%
Grapes: Lambrusco Salamino
Professional Rating: Somm Journal 92, JS 90 Vivino

What we tasted and smelled in this Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco: 

  • Color: Purple more than ruby, a bit frothy, a little cloudy
  • On the nose: Grape juice, cherry cough drop, raspberry candy, raspberry filling for a cake, some spice, a little wine cellar smell
  • In the mouth: Soda-like bubbles, pleasant tannin and bitterness, gastronomic wine, grape skins, some blood orange pith, some good acidity


Food to pair with this Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco: A great Holiday meal wine, turkey, white meat, honey-baked ham, good throughout the whole meal, charcuterie, dark chocolate torte, salty foods
 
As a reminder on our rating scale, we rate on a scale of 1-10, with no half points, where 7 and above means that we would buy it, and 4 and below means that we are likely to pour it down the sink, and a 5 or 6 means we are likely to drink it and finish it, but we are probably not going to buy it. 

Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco Wine Rating: 

  • Joe: 8/10
  • Carmela: 8/10


Wine: Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena Premium Secco
Region: Italy, Emilia-Romagna
Year: 2024
Price: $21.97
Retailer: wine.com
Alcohol: 11%
Grapes: Lambrusco di Sorbara
Professional Rating: WW 93 Vivino

What we tasted and smelled in this Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena Premium Secco: 

  • Color: Pink, bright coral, fizzy and frothy, translucent, looks like a Rosé, rhubarb, pretty
  • On the nose: Raspberry, Lemonhead candy, strawberry, craisin, pineapple, POG 
  • In the mouth: So good it is dangerous, raspberry, very chuggable, pink lemonade, strawberry lemonade, good acidity


Food to pair with this Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena Premium Secco: Salty foods, spicy foods, fish and chips, fried foods, spicy tuna sushi
 

Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena Wine Rating Premium Secco: 

  • Joe: 8/10
  • Carmela: 10/10



Which one of these are you finishing tonight?

  • Carmela: Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena
  • Joe: Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco



Taste profiles expected from Lambrusco  49:07

  • General 
    • Can vary quite a bit. 
    • Sorbara: Tart strawberries, rhubarb, pink grapefruit, violets, high acidity.
    • Salamino: Cherries, raspberries, fresh earth
  • Venturini Baldini Montelocco Lambrusco
    • Winery:  Short Charmat method. Perceptible fragrance of herbs and juicy black cherries. Has a fresh, semi-dry flavor with light tannic sensations
    • Somm Journal: Raspberry and wild-cherry lozenge candy meet tart cranberry and a hint of funk to make for an ideal match with salumi galore.
    • JS: This rose-colored sparkling wine has plenty of red berry fruit on the nose, with notes of cherries, dried flowers and grapefruit. It’s medium-bodied with very light tannins and a crunchy, fresh and dry finish.
  • Cleto Chiarli Lambrusco di Sorbara Vecchia Modena Premium Secco
    • Winery: Deep rosé color, with clear fragrances of strawberry and brushwood. Its taste is fresh, pervasive, mineral, and at the same time velvety and surprisingly pleasant. Dynamic.
    • WW: a bright, cherry-red color with a playful fizz. It opens with aromas of pomegranate and subtle hints of savory earth. Light to medium-bodied, this Lambrusco offers vibrant acidity and lively tart red fruit flavors. The palate exhibits a pleasing weight, culminating in a bright, lively finish.



What is the verdict on Lambrusco? 51:05
Very pleased. A great change-up in the style of wine. Not stuffy, fun, and delicious.


Wines coming up in future episodes in case you want to drink along with us 52:16


Outro and how to find The Wine Pair Podcast 52:27

Ok, so, Carmela, it’s time for us to go, but before we do, we want to thank you very much for listening to us - and if you haven’t done so yet, now would be the perfect time to follow or subscribe to our podcast and also a fantastic time to leave us a nice rating and review on our website or Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts - and it is an awesome and free way to support us and help us grow listeners.

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