During a recent media trip to Italy’s Franciacorta region I had the pleasure of visiting La Valle Winery (Vini La Valle) and being hosted by Winemaker Stefano Cailucci. We began the visit visiting his vineyards (shown below) followed by a tour of his new winemaking facility and concluding at the original winery. I have to say the historic element of this visit plus the amazing energy and passion Stefano brought to our visit really made this one of my favorite winery visits in Franciacorta. And, of course the wines were lovely. Read more about La Valle Winery below…..

Winemaker Stefano Camilucci, who is the nephew of the owner and has taken the winery into some of the most cutting-edge and forward thinking in Franciacorta. When you see his winemaking facility you’ll see why!

Me and my new work boyfriend Ryan of The Fermented Fruit. He wrote a fabulous piece on Franciacorta on his blog which you can find here and I recommend you check out.

Touring the new winemaking facility. Stefano’s background is in engineering so he built a very advanced facility helping create these beautiful wines.

We concluded the visit at the original La Valle Winery home where we toured the cellar and got to taste the wine.

The original cellar which is now really more of a display but there are still a lot of older vintages of the La Valle Wines storer here.

Franciacorta Wine Ambassador Laura with winemaker Stefano.

Cheers to this amazing visit, the beautiful wines and sharing new memories together!

This is their best selling sparkling wine, the La Valle Italia Primium Brut. I found this a bit tart with more acidic flavors and less creaminess than some of the others we tasted.

The Satèn was extremely lovely and as you have seen from my other wine tastings overall I found the Saten Wines to be my favorite at almost every winery we visited.

For those of you who are not familair with Satèn wines it means that they are produced with only white grapes (in Francicorta that means Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay) and they have a lighter style using only 4.5 atmospheres rather than the typical 6 atmospheres of pressure in bottle.  This results in a lighter more elegant feminine style than a non Satèn.