© Tannico

Fizzy and red? It can only be Lambrusco.

When it comes to rehabilitating unfashionable wines, one wine has a particularly tough challenge ahead.

One great thing about millennial consumers is that they don't remember their parents' mistakes. This is why Lambrusco is ripe for a comeback. But it's not an overnight sensation: Medici Ermete, a fourth-generation winery, has spent two decades painstakingly laying the groundwork.

Lambrusco is a red sparkling wine from the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. The grapes it is made from are believed to have been domesticated from local wild grapes (lambrusco means "wild grape" in Italian) but they are vitis vinifera, the species responsible for every great wine from Albarino to Zinfandel. Lambrusco grapes are not related to the lesser vitis labrusca native to North America.

As a quirky local product – low in alcohol but high in flavor, and a great pairing for salumi – Lambrusco would be ready for discovery in today's wine world anyway. But baby boomers got there first in the 1970s and early 1980s and nearly spoiled the whole thing, glugging down Riunite on ice ("that's nice") at their pre-AIDS key parties until the overcropped, underflavored sweet froth became something they wanted to graduate from. The Boomers salted the earth for Lambrusco to be taken seriously, and removing that stigma took decades.

"We launched the first single-vineyard, vintage-dated Lambrusco which was called Concerto," Alberto Medici told me. "The first vintage was 1993. This product changed the scenario for Lambrusco. This product has really changed the perception of Lambrusco around the world. But it took time for the media to take it seriously."

If you taste Medici Ermete Concerto, and you have never had a sparkling red wine before, you might be astonished. It's rich and bold, with bracing blackberry fruit and bubbles and acidity to carry it. It's a serious wine, and it's not expensive: it's like a dream for people who would rather drink a red wine but have to drink a bubbly for some reason.

"The way we produce Concerto is, we lower the yields over 40 percent less than what the consorzio allow us to produce," Medici said. "Then we do a selection of the grapes we collect. And extremely long skin contact. That way we can carry more flavors and tannin. Second fermentation is carried on in tank at extremely low temperature so we can maintain the flavors. We create a Lambrusco with extremely strong flavors and tannin and body. It's dry but very fruity. An extremely long lasting finish."

It's a serious wine, one of several in the Medici Ermete portfolio, which in the US is now imported by Kobrand, home to Taittinger and the makers of Sassicaia, among others. A Lambrusco producer might have looked out of place a decade ago, but times have changed.

Constance Savage, Kobrand's vice president of supplier relations, said that most other Lambruscos are found in supermarket chains in the US, and aren't selling all that well.

"These Lambrusco brands face tougher times due to sales being replaced by other sweet wines," Savage said. "Kobrand took a different approach with Medici Ermete by presenting the portfolio to buyers and sommeliers at on-premise, trendy and fine dining establishments, as well as boutique wine shops. The category requires a strong effort in education and marketing, especially for millennial consumers who do not know what to expect from a sparkling red wine with considerable acidity. Fortunately, younger consumers do not necessarily have a preconceived negative notion about the Lambrusco category. We believe the category will continue to grow over time with continued education."

The irony is that if you are a wine geek, Lambrusco is a fascinating rabbit hole of terroir differences and 13 unique grape varieties called Lambrusco that may or may not be closely related. Medici Ermete grows four of them on its 75 hectares of vineyards. Its largest plantings are of Lambrusco Salamino, which gets its name because the cylindrical bunches look like a salami. But the family grows three other grapes called Lambrusco as well. And that's not all.

© Gusti d'Italia

The array of flavors sometimes found in good Lambrusco.

There's a grape called Ancellotta that is grown in the region to add color to the red wines, but wineries are only allowed by DOC rules to use 15 percent of it in a blend. The Medicis like it more than other wineries, so they make a wine oddly named Solo that has about 35 percent Ancellotta. It's also a serious wine, with a tart berry aroma and refreshing black plum fruit at the edge of ripeness.

"Ancellota smoothes down the acidity of Lambrusco and brings up the fruitiness," Medici says. "It has good color, but it doesn't have the acidity of Lambrusco. Acidity is a key characteristic of Lambrusco.

It (Solo) may be less fresh but I believe it's more complex, with very gentle tannin. We wanted to give a different character to this wine. I think that Ancellota that grows in our vineyards is distinctive compared to the Ancellota that appears on the market. We treat Ancellota like a noble vine like we do with Lambrusco. We try to lower the yields. We try to treat our vineyards like gardens."

I warned you that Lambrusco grapes are a rabbit hole of wine geekiness. The Medicis are experimenting with plantings of Lambrusco di Sorbara, a variety well respected in the area despite a fundamental difficulty: it produces only female flowers, so it must be planted near another type of vitis vinifera vines or the Lambrusco di Sorbara vines cannot pollinate and will not produce grapes.

"It's a very different type of grape and you can create a very different type of Lambrusco," Medici says. "It's very light in color. Tannin is very very light. The acidity is amazing. You have the same acidity as Champagne. I think in the future Medici Ermete will produce a lot of this but now we have very little quantity."

Just to make sure you get the message that this is a wine for the cognescenti, Medici is planning to bottle it undisgorged, with the sediment still in the bottle.

This is the funny thing about Medici Ermete Lambrusco. In a way, it's super geeky, yet it's also one of the most easy-to-understand, pleasurable wines you'll find: a red wine AND a sparkling wine. If only the baby boomers hadn't almost ruined it ... but the time to reclaim Lambrusco has come.