Masottina Contrada Granda Prosecco Superiore Brut
£12.25
The wine
Pale yellow with greenish highlights and a fine, lingering mousse. Delicate and refined on the nose, opening on grape, Golden Delicious apple, lime and pink grapefruit, giving way to riper pear, plum, white melon and wisteria. Creamy and intense in the mouth with good structure and a harmonious, elegant finish.
Conegliano Valdobbiadene is the DOCG at the top of the Prosecco hierarchy, covering the steep hills between the two towns which were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2019. The slopes are worked by hand because no machine can reach them, yields are lower and the wines are correspondingly finer than the flat DOC zone.
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.
