Il Mosnel

Mosnel sits in Camignone, in the heart of Franciacorta, around a centuries-old residence with sixteenth-century cellars. The Barboglio family inherited the estate in 1836. Its name is a dialect place name of Celtic origin meaning a heap of stones, after the stony ground the buildings stand on. It replaced "Azienda Agricola Barzanò Barboglio" in 1976.

The turn came with Emanuela Barboglio. She planted the estate's first specialised vineyards, and in 1968 she took it into the young Franciacorta DOC. The estate still carries her name: il Mosnel di Emanuela Barboglio e Figli. Today her children run it as the fifth generation. Giulio Barzanò looks after the technical, production and commercial side, and Lucia Barzanò after marketing, outside relations and administration.

Mosnel works only its own grapes, from 41 hectares lying almost in a single block. They are planted to Chardonnay, Pinot Bianco and Pinot Nero at a minimum of 5,000 vines per hectare, on moraine soils the house describes as more limestone than clay. All of it is farmed organically, with certification. Since 2014 the family has worked with the agronomists of SATA on biodiversity: native hedges, bees, cover crops and, in the vineyard that carries the estate's name, a spiral of 65 pairs of hornbeam and hawthorn laid out along the Fibonacci sequence. Lucia and Giulio say they learned from their mother that a vineyard is a living ecosystem, to be studied, respected and followed.

In the cellar, every Mosnel Franciacorta ferments at least partly in wood. The non-vintage wines take in reserve wines from earlier harvests to keep the house style steady, while the vintage wines are meant to show their year. The work happens in buildings from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, joined in 2018 by a new cellar on three underground levels.

In 2026, 190 years after the inheritance, Lucia and Giulio marked the anniversary with a conference on agroforestry in the vineyard.