When the wine industry is its own worst enemy

The wine industry is often its own worst enemy, creating complication and confusion over a delicious beverage made from fermented grape juice.

I reckon that if you asked 100 Australian wine drinkers to name a sparkling wine region in Italy, maybe half of them would name Prosecco. The number able to identify Franciacorta would be in low single figures.

Franciacorta, in Lombardy, has around 2,000 hectares planted for its sparkling wine production. But it announced early this month that it is diving the region into sub-zones.

Remarkably, it plans no few than 134 sub zones - an absurd figure when even wine aficionados find it hard to remember the 12 Cru of Beaujolais.

Industry analyst https://www.wine-searcher.com/ slammed the inanity of making wine more complicated, saying: "It's utterly ridiculous. Nobody cares about Franciacorta that much."

After all, Franciacorta produces just 1/35th of the sparkling wine made in Prosecco. 

Many of the wines are excellent, certainly, but... 

The website https://winenews.it/ says the new appellations "precisely and meticulously demarcated by the 'wine cartographer', Alessandro Masnaghetti, are all about emphasising regional diversity."

The Franciacorta Consorzio said in a press release: "Three years of quiet work have now culminated in the first Franciacorta Vineyard and Zone Map based on the expertise of Alessandro Masnaghetti, world famous journalist and cartographer, who produced accurate and meticulous mapping of 134 zones within the denomination designed to find the right balance between detail, zone coverage, history and tradition."

Yawn already.