Our annual pilgrimage to Italy is always a remarkable experience. Each year, I travel with my dear friend Cristian Casarin, group sommelier of The Restaurant Pendolino and La Rosa The Strand. He and I journey to Verona for the world’s largest wine exhibition, Vinitaly. After four intense days, we keep the momentum going, stopping in to visit new wineries and reconnect with old ones.

This year, we returned to Franciacorta in Lombardy’s Brescia region. A true viticultural jewel, the area is Italy’s legitimate answer to Champagne, and Franciacorta is both the name of the appellation and the region. While Prosecco enjoys a global juggernaut status, Franciacorta is indisputably Italy’s most premium and boutique sparkling wine region. Like Champagne, the wine is made in the méthode traditionnelle, where secondary fermentation occurs in the bottle rather than in vats (where prosecco and similar sparkling varieties develop their bubbles).

Comparatively, Franciacorta produces a very niche product – just 17.4 million bottles of wine annually. Its French counterpart, Champagne, sits at something closer to producing 268 million bottles per year.

Our first stop on the Franciacorta deep dive was iconic producer Bellavista, where winemaker extraordinaire Mattia Vezzola, a pioneer in Italian winemaking, had his team show us around the stunning estate. Comprising 190 hectares of vines, Bellavista accounts for about one-tenth of Franciacorta vineyards, harvesting chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot blanc to make some of the region’s finest wines.

Next stop is Berlucchi, the birthplace of the appellation where the very first bottle of Franciacorta was produced in 1961. Today, it is the region’s largest producer, with an annual output exceeding five million bottles, 1.6 million bottles more than fellow renowned producer, Ca’ del Bosco (where the winery’s modern art collection is almost as impressive as its sparkling wine, and is also well worth the visit).

In keeping with the opulent theme of this year’s trip, we then headed south to another part of Brescia, Calvisano, to visit the stunning aquaculture caviar production of Calvisius, home to some of the world’s most exquisite caviar, which we’ve proudly had on the Pendolino menu for years.

With admirable environmental and sustainability credentials, Calvisius was the first caviar producer to farm sturgeon – a threatened fish species – back in 1977, and today it enjoys a reputation as one of the world’s leading caviar suppliers. Cristian and I examined the 60-hectare ponds where four different varieties of sturgeon are farmed in local natural spring water emanating from the Northern Italian Alps. We then headed down to an underground viewing platform, and enjoyed an indulgent caviar degustation lunch, paired with some of the best Franciacorta vintages of recent time.

See here for Nino’s decadent scallop tartare and mascarpone crostini.