Riddle me this: Why has Prosecco been virtually non-existent on SommSelect? French Champagne is omnipresent here, but Italy’s best-known sparkler gets no love. Since I’m the in-house Italian wine guy, I’ll take the blame, and yet it wasn’t even me who unearthed today’s sublimely elegant gem from Bortolin—it was hardcore Champagne Snob Mark Osburn, our Daily Offers curator.
We all know how hard it is to sway a Champagne Snob but Alessandro Bortolin did it, winning enthusiastic raves for this wine’s effortless melding of refinement, refreshment, and superb value. Hand-crafted by a small family-run estate in the heart of the Valdobbiadene-Conegliano DOCG, this is the kind of artisanal Prosecco we know is out there, but which tends to get lost in the stacks amid mass-market alternatives. Dry, detailed, mineral, fragrant…Mark couldn’t stop talking about Bortolin’s Brut, and now I can’t either. We can’t wait to pop the cork on a fresh bottle!
The ubiquity of inexpensive Prosecco works to the disadvantage of localized, specialized producers like Alessandro Bortolin, whose nine hectares of vineyards are in the village of Santo Stefano, in the municipality of Valdobbiadene—one of the anchor towns of Prosecco’s most prestigious DOCG appellation. There is a broader “Prosecco” DOC zone covering most of the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia regions, but the Valdobbiadene-Conegliano DOCG covers roughly 18,000 hectares of vineyards in one select section of Veneto; vineyards sit on steep, often terraced, slopes of clay, limestone, and glacial moraine, with the Italian Dolomites visible in one direction and the Venetian lagoon in the other.
Although both Valdobbiadene-Conegliano and Champagne are UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Italian partisans will tell you that the former is more beautiful (and they’d be right). But forget that—they are ultimately different wines, as is reflected in the price. Bortolin’s family has roots in the area dating to the 1500s, and still he does everything by hand in the vineyards and cellar, hand-harvesting the Glera grapes for this Brut and fermenting them in pressurized tanks according to the traditional Charmat method. The wine rests on its fine lees (spent yeasts) for about three months before bottling, lending some of the bread dough/fresh cream character sparkling wine lovers have come to crave, regardless of where the wine comes from.
This Brut MV receives a dosage of nine grams/liter, lending it some extra concentration on the mid-palate without sweetening up the brisk, dry, wet-stone finish. I wouldn’t hesitate to put it up against any similarly priced Cava, Crémant, Pét-Nat…you name it. The wine displays great fruit purity with notes of white peach, citrus, and Granny Smith apple complemented by hints of white flower and wet stones, and the ultra-fine mousse is another huge selling point. Serve this nicely chilled, about 45 degrees, in all-purpose stems with a platter of Venetian-style bar snacks and you are hitting a wine world home run in our book. I’m sorry it took us so long to get here!
