Franciacorta for drivers

Halfway through the Friday tour the cars stop for lunch, and there is Franciacorta on the table. Some of the people who get out will drink it. The ones taking the next leg get something else, poured from the same table, by the same people, into the same kind of glass.

That is a small thing, and it is the whole reason the partnership works. A wine partner at a driving event has to think about the driving. Consorzio Franciacorta did, and made sure a non alcoholic option was available at every stop where a car still had to be moved afterwards. Nobody spends much time thinking about the participant who is halfway through a tour and cannot drink. Franciacorta did.

The consortium was a main partner of Lugano Elegance 2026 and poured across the event. At the lunch on the tour, at the aperitifs, at the dinners, and at the stops in between, wherever the drivers came to a halt and stood around talking about what they had just driven through.

Franciacorta itself is a place before it is a wine. It sits in the province of Brescia, in Lombardy, on the hills between the southern shore of Lake Iseo and the city of Brescia. The wine is made by the traditional method, with the second fermentation taking place inside the bottle it is sold in, from Chardonnay, Pinot Nero and Pinot Bianco. It became a DOC in 1967 and a DOCG in 1995, and the rules that came with the promotion are strict about time: a non vintage Franciacorta spends at least eighteen months on its lees before it can be released, and a vintage at least thirty. The Consorzio per la tutela del Franciacorta, which represents the producers, was formed in 1990.

Anyone who follows the 1000 Miglia will already have noticed the geography. Brescia is where the race starts and where it finishes. Franciacorta is Brescia’s own wine country, twenty minutes up the road from the city. The two things have been neighbours for as long as both have existed.

Which is why the consortium’s presence at the 1000 Miglia Warm Up CH in 2026 was not an arrangement of convenience. The Warm Up is the Swiss event that runs ahead of the 1000 Miglia, over the roads of Ticino, with many of the same cars and many of the same people. Franciacorta served the participants there as well, at the refreshment stops through the route and at the tables at the end of the day.

Between the two events that is a full season, in two countries, on both sides of the same mountains.

There is a rhythm to a driving weekend that anyone who has done one will recognise. The morning belongs to the cars. The middle of the day belongs to the roads. The evening belongs to the people, and to the long, slow business of finding out what everyone else drove and where they went wrong. A wine made by a method that requires eighteen months of patience is well suited to the last part of that.

The measure of the partnership, though, was not the evening. It was the table at the lunch stop that had something for the people who still had to drive.