Wow. Price?
$75 and it has a cult following even at that price point.
I am surprised that nobody has mentioned Bruno Giacose. He makes a small amount of Pinot Nero based sparkling wine. 
Not available in the States as far as I know but one of my favorite wines of VinItaly 2012:
Borgo delle Oche, Friuli
***Terra e Cielo Spumante Brut metodo Classico 2009
ROCKSTAR!!! 70% Chardonnay, 30% Pinot with 21 months en tirage. This was seriously in the Champagne zone, big structure, bold flavors, tiny bead. Nice packaging too.
Me too - love Bellavista -
I love Champagne, but the Italian sparkling wines I like the most make no effort to compete with Champagne directly. I’ve recently had ‘classic method’ Verdicchio di Matelica and Fiano di Avellino that I thought were excellent, but they were of course entirely different from Champagne.
Franciacorta doesn’t do it for me. The best Champagney Italians I’ve had have been from Piedmont, such as the Giacosa mentioned above, or the Valentino, or one or two Alta Langa bottlings.
Great point about the Alta Langa bubblies. La Luna nel Pozzo in Neive serves a fine glass with its amuse bouche, and the wines are seen often as the greeting glass in local ristoranti. I keep meaning to explore the range of them and buy some of the best.
I never think of any of the wines discussed above as in competition with Champagne. I think perhaps some CA bubblies once aspired to that, but the Italian wines not so much. Great Champagne is in another league altogether, but what I find is that Champagne can be brilliant paired with some foods, as can wines like Sauternes, but terrible with others. The advantage of many of the Italian bubblies is that they are extremely food-friendly, over a wide range of dishes. I enjoy sipping Bellavista Saten, but would prefer to sip a top old vintage Champagne. But what food does to that wine, and vice versa, is often magical…
Totally agree about Aperol Spritz, it’s the alcoholic equivalent of potato chips, you can’t drink just one.
I use the recipe I was given by Max Stefanelli, one of the owners of Terroni, in LA: ’ Aperol (little less than 2/3) splash of soda and 1/3 of prosecco… And personally I add a splash of cynar to add some bitterness.’
Use good Prosecco, as Bill suggests.
I serve with half of an orange slice thick enough to eat after it has been marinated in the drink. And when I have taken the last full slice from the orange, I squeeze a little fresh orange juice into each glass, which makes for a smoother, rounder, very slightly sweeter drink which you might appreciate as a change of pace for your third or fourth spritzoni. Club soda is not always easy to come by over here (a bit odd, since tonic and other even more esoteric mixers are), so I use fizzy mineral water. While it is only a splash (the above recipe being pretty much the classic), the mineral water makes a superior drink IMO.
And speaking of potato chips, Oliver, many Italans seem to like their spritz with salt-and-pepper-flavored Pringles, which are rare here and May not even exist in the U.S.!
Oranges pickled in Prosecco, now there’s an idea.
Thanks to all for the recommendations.
+1 on Bellavista Cuvee Saten
+1 on Giacosa
There are some quite interesting sparklers coming out of the Langhe. I quite enjoyed one at Rizzi two years ago that’s 50% chardonnay, 40% pinot nero, 10% nebbiolo. A lot of Barolo makers are Champagne nuts.
Rainoldi makes a nice 100% Nebbiolo based rosato brut in the Valtellina too…
So does Sergio Germano, very interesting new category. Nebbiolo makes really good Rosè, no reason why it wouldn’t be interesting as classic method.
Fourth’d.
There are hundreds of fantastic sparkling wines being made all across Italy, literally from just below Mont Blanc to Sicily. Many of these wine are strictly local and few people have heard of them (sparkling Durello from Monti Lessini and plenty of other outlandish stuff like that).
This is a function of Italian wine culture: they LOVE sparkling wines. It probably sounds counter-intuitive, but Italy can also be a great place to shop for Champagne. There seem to be quite a number of enoteche whose Champagne selection beats most things outside Rheims itself 
If I had to make a list of Italy’s greatest sparkling wines, it would take some time and run into dozens and dozens of names (even if, like Oliver, I am not big on Franciacorta at all). For the sake of concision, though:
Arunda Vivaldi (Alto Adige, everything they make)
Frozza (Prosecco/Colbertaldo, everything they make)
Ferrando (Carema/Viverone, I find their sparkling Erbaluce absolutely bewitching)
You are so right about Champagne in Italy. The local wine bar near the podunk hotel I stay at for Vinitaly, outside Verona, has a huge list: Selosses, Fleurie, all sorts of Grandes Marques, and the rest of what they sell seems mostly to consist of Aperol Spritz by the gallon.
Big plus one on Arunda and Muggie gives the late Alois Kracher a run for his money on being a wild and crazy wine guy! That’s him on the left, kept our customers entertained all night when he visited our bar:
Verona is one of the Champagne capitals . The stunning thing is you can almost routinely find back or mature vintages even of relatively off-the-beaten track wines (recently had Aubry’s 1999 Nombre d’Or for a princely sum of 69 EUR off a restaurant list in Verona ).
About two years ago, a local wine bar in Quincinetto, a small and totally insignificant village along the A5 autostrada close to the Piemonte/Val d’Aosta border with perhaps no more than several hundred inhabitants and not much else to recommend it, has the whole Selosse range, from Initiale to Substance, to choose from (I sure hope they also have stocked up on all the Cote Pharon and Cote this and Cote that cuvees since ). Italy is simply awash in Selosse