Masottina Collezione 96 Prosecco Brut
£10.45
The wine
Delicate straw yellow, enhanced by a fine, lingering perlage. Golden Delicious apple, pink grapefruit and lime come through clearly on the nose, joined by softer hints of pear and plum with wisteria flowers. Soft and silky, with the freshness of fruit straight off the tree.
Collezione 96 refers to 1996, the year the family began the range. Brut caps residual sugar at 12 grams per litre, the drier of the two main Prosecco styles, and with less sugar to soften it the wine reads as crisper and more mineral. Made by the Charmat method, with the second fermentation in tank rather than bottle.
The producer
Masottina
View all Masottina winesThe Dal Bianco family have made wine since 1946, when grandfather Epifanio bought the five-hectare Ai Palazzi estate at Gorgo al Monticano. Restoring the manor house above the vineyard uncovered an old inscription reading Casa Masottina, and the name stuck.
Three generations on, the wines come from nearly 300 hectares across the Conegliano Valdobbiadene hills and the wider Veneto. Those hills were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2019 for their cultural landscape: steep, narrow ridges worked by hand because no machine can reach them, with vineyards, woodland and small settlements interleaved.
The family were among the pioneers of Rive bottlings, the Prosecco equivalent of a single-vineyard wine. Rive means steep hillside in the local dialect, and only 43 of them are recognised; the fruit must come from that named hill alone, be hand-harvested and carry a vintage. Masottina's Rive di Ogliano wines are among the most respected examples, and they make an unusually clear case that Prosecco can express site.
