Acqui

Brachetto d'Acqui — labelled simply Acqui on many bottles — is the sweet, fragrant, lightly sparkling red of the hills around Acqui Terme in southern Piedmont. It is pale cherry-red under a soft pink foam, smells emphatically of wild strawberry and rose petal, and is genuinely sweet: the fermentation is stopped part-way, which leaves both the fizz and a great deal of the grape's own sugar and drops the alcohol to around 5.5 to 7 percent. A DOCG since 1996, it must be at least 97 percent Brachetto.