Italy · Prosecco — Conegliano-Valdobbiadene & Asolo (Treviso hills)

Cantine Gregoletto

Family winery in Premaor di Miane farming 18 hillside hectares in the Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOCG, making Prosecco Superiore, a cloudy col fondo frizzante on its lees, and one of the last commercial Verdiso wines in the Veneto.

The producer

Cantine Gregoletto farms 18 hectares of hillside parcels in Premaor di Miane, a village in the Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOCG, and makes wine the way the zone worked before industrialisation rewrote the terms. The family's presence in the Valdobbiadene hills is documented to the 1600s, and the winery carries Luigi Gregoletto's name as a founding mark of Treviso wine culture. What that history produces in practical terms: a col fondo frizzante still bottled cloudy on its lees, and a Verdiso still white made from the indigenous grape that most of the region abandoned when Glera took over.

Neither wine is fashionable in the way a new-wave natural label might be. Both are old. The Sui Lieviti frizzante is the ancestral form of Prosecco: unfiltered, unsweetened, alive with residual yeast and bread-crust character. The Verdiso is simply what the hills grew before a single grape codified the appellation. Gregoletto kept both going while the zone around it converted.

Known for

Prosecco Superiore DOCG; Prosecco Sui Lieviti col fondo frizzante; Verdiso still white

Notable facts

The story

The Grape the Zone Left Behind

Verdiso was the white grape of the Treviso hills long before anyone decided Glera would define them. Through the second half of the twentieth century, as Prosecco found export markets and commercial producers standardized the zone around one variety and one style, vineyard after vineyard in the Conegliano Valdobbiadene foothills was replanted. Verdiso vines came out. Glera went in. The economics were clear. By the time the DOCG was formalized, Verdiso had become a rarity, farmed by a handful of estates too rooted in the older hill-farm culture to convert everything. Gregoletto was among them. The family kept Verdiso parcels in production across generations, growing the grape and bottling it as a still white, unremarkable in commercial terms and irreplaceable in every other sense. Walk the Miane hillsides today and you will find almost no Verdiso. Walk the Gregoletto cellar and you will find it on the shelf.

From the atlas

Cantine Gregoletto

At A Glance

Producer: Cantine Gregoletto Location: Premaor di Miane, Province of Treviso, Veneto, Italy Appellation: Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOCG Core Grape: Glera Also: Verdiso (indigenous still white) Vineyard: 18 hectares across mid to high hillside parcels Production: 100,000 to 500,000 bottles annually Style: Hillside Prosecco Superiore; ancestral col fondo frizzante; indigenous still white

The Producer

Cantine Gregoletto farms 18 hectares of hillside parcels in Premaor di Miane, a village in the Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOCG, and makes wine the way the zone worked before industrialisation rewrote the terms. The family's presence in the Valdobbiadene hills is documented to the 1600s, and the winery carries Luigi Gregoletto's name as a founding mark of Treviso's wine culture. What that history produces in practical terms: a col fondo frizzante still bottled cloudy on its lees, and a Verdiso still white made from the indigenous grape that most of the region abandoned when Glera took over.

Neither wine is fashionable in the way that a new-wave natural label might be. Both are old. The Sui Lieviti frizzante is the ancestral form of Prosecco: unfiltered, unsweetened, alive with residual yeast and bread-crust character. The Verdiso is simply what the hills grew before a single grape codified the appellation. Gregoletto kept both going while the zone around it converted.

Place

Conelgiano Valdobbiadene DOCG occupies the foothills of the eastern Veneto, where the Alps begin to flatten toward the Adriatic plain. The landscape is steep enough that UNESCO listed it in 2019: narrow hillside strips called ciglioni, hand-tended on gradients that machines cannot reach. Premaor di Miane sits toward the Valdobbiadene end of the appellation, the western flank where the hills are steeper and the Glera parcels sit at medium to high elevation.

Prosecco here is an appellation, not a grape. The grape is Glera, a variety native to the northeastern Veneto foothills with naturally high acidity, stone-fruit and white-flower aromatics, and a sensitivity to elevation that shows clearly in the difference between hillside and plain-grown fruit. The DOCG Superiore tier is the hillside zone specifically: the Prosecco Superiore designation on a label means the grapes came from these steep parcels, not the valley floor. That elevation keeps acidity higher, ripening slower, and the aromatic profile cleaner than the lower-lying IGT production that dominates industrial bottlings.

Soil And Site

Gregoletto's 18 hectares are spread across mid to high hillside positions in the DOCG zone. Verified sources do not specify soil composition for these parcels. The hillside aspect is what shapes the wines directly: slower ripening, higher acidity in the finished Glera, and the need to harvest in stages rather than in a single pass, picking each parcel as it reaches the right point rather than sweeping the whole estate at once.

Story

The Gregoletto family farmed these hills across several centuries before the modern appellation existed. When Conegliano Valdobbiadene formalized as a DOCG and the commercial Prosecco industry grew around Glera as its central grape, the calculus for most estates became clear: convert to Glera, increase volume, and sell into an export market that wanted consistent, sweet-leaning, clean-frothed wine at a recognizable price point.

Gregoletto's range tells a different story. The winery produces Glera at the DOCG level, but it also kept Verdiso, the indigenous white that predates Prosecco's commercial dominance, and it maintained the col fondo method for its Sui Lieviti frizzante rather than switching to the autoclave-fermented, disgorged, and dosed style that defines most Prosecco on shelf. These are farming and cellar choices with direct consequences: Verdiso stays in the vineyard when it could be pulled; the frizzante stays cloudy and yeasty when it could be filtered clear and sweetened to travel more easily.

Vineyards And Cellar

Harvest at Gregoletto is done by hand and in stages, working through parcels at different elevations as each reaches the right ripeness rather than harvesting the whole estate at once. That tiered approach affects what goes into each wine: higher parcels pick later and carry higher acidity into the press.

The Sui Lieviti frizzante is made by the col fondo method, also called ancestral method: the wine is bottled before fermentation is complete, so the final fermentation happens in the bottle itself, leaving the yeast sediment inside. There is no disgorgement, no added sweetness, no filtration. The bottle carries everything the fermentation produced. The wine has delicate bubbles and a fresh, savory finish.

Farming is conducted with sustainable agricultural practices across the 18 hectares, prioritizing grape quality over yield.

Wines

The range divides into three categories: Prosecco Superiore DOCG sparkling, the Sui Lieviti frizzante, and still wine.

Under the DOCG label, Gregoletto produces three styles from Glera. The Brut is bone-dry with a clean mousse and high acidity from the hillside parcels. The Extra Dry carries a small residual sugar level, the style that built the appellation's reputation: ripe white fruit and mandarin on the nose, apple and pear on the palate, with the grape's aromatic character amplified by the sparkle rather than masked. The Brut Nature is zero-dosage, bottled on its lees in a col fondo approach: drier than the Brut, earthier, with a yeast texture that runs through the whole palate.

Sui Lieviti is a frizzante, meaning the pressure is gentler than the fully sparkling spumante DOCG wines. Made from 100% Glera, bottled cloudy on its lees in the ancestral col fondo style, it is pale straw yellow with a soft bead. The nose opens on wisteria and white flowers, green apple and pear, a thread of herbal freshness, and the classic bread-crust note that comes from extended yeast contact. The palate is clear and vertical, fragrant, with a fresh and savory finish rather than any sweetness.

The still wine range includes Verdiso, one of the last commercial examples of this indigenous Treviso white grape in production anywhere in the Veneto. Details on reds are present but thin in verified sources.

In The Glass

Across the range, the Glera character from hillside Miane parcels is consistent: high acidity, white-flower and stone-fruit aromatics, a clean rather than weighty body, and a finish that lifts rather than lingers heavily. The differences between bottles come from what the cellar does afterward.

The DOCG Extra Dry is the most immediately aromatic: ripe mandarin, apple and pear on the nose, fresh and frothy in the mouth, with the residual sugar just sufficient to round the edges without making the wine taste sweet. The Brut trades that fruitiness for a drier, sharper line, finishing crisply with acidity doing the work that sugar does in the Extra Dry.

The Sui Lieviti is a different experience from both. The bead is softer, the colour cloudy rather than clear. The nose adds bread crust and wisteria to the apple-pear fruit base. In the mouth, the texture is richer than the disgorged wines, the savory yeast note running through mid-palate and into the finish. The acidity is still there, lifting the wine, but the yeast contact changes the register from aromatic and effervescent to something more grounded and complete.

A Bottle To Understand It

Start with Prosecco Sui Lieviti. It is 100% Glera from the Miane hillside parcels, fermented and bottled in the col fondo style without disgorgement, filtration, or added sugar. The bottle arrives cloudy, the sediment visible, the bead soft. Pour it straight and smell the glass before the bubbles dissipate: wisteria, green apple, pear, a yeast breadiness that separates it immediately from everything in the supermarket Prosecco aisle. On the palate it is fresh and savory rather than sweet, the acidity present but not aggressive, the finish clean and dry.

This is the wine Gregoletto is known for among people who know it. It is also the quickest way to understand what col fondo means in practice and why it matters that one estate kept making wine this way when the rest of the appellation moved on.

Anecdote

Verdiso was the white grape of the Treviso hills long before anyone decided Glera would define them. Through the second half of the twentieth century, as Prosecco found export markets and commercial producers standardized the zone around one variety and one style, vineyard after vineyard in the Conegliano Valdobbiadene foothills was replanted. Verdiso vines came out. Glera went in. The economics were clear. By the time the DOCG was formalized, Verdiso had become a rarity, farmed by a handful of estates too rooted in the older hill-farm culture to convert everything. Gregoletto was among them. The family kept Verdiso parcels in production across generations, growing the grape and bottling it as a still white, unremarkable in commercial terms and irreplaceable in every other sense. Walk the Miane hillsides today and you will find almost no Verdiso. Walk the Gregoletto cellar and you will find it on the shelf.

Final Word

Gregoletto is a hillside Prosecco estate that survived the industrialisation of its own appellation without becoming a museum. The Sui Lieviti frizzante is how Prosecco tasted before it became a category, and the Verdiso is the grape the zone used to grow. Both are still here.

Sources

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