Italy · Piave, Lison & eastern plain (Treviso / Venezia)

Casa Vinicola Botter

A family wine company founded in Fossalta di Piave in 1928, now in its third generation, producing still and sparkling wines from Veneto and across Italy.

The producer

Carlo Botter and his wife Maria opened a small wine shop in Fossalta di Piave in 1928, selling wine in casks and demijohns to local buyers near Venice. The cellar is still at Via L. Cadorna 17 in the same northeastern Veneto town. What has changed is everything else. Today the third generation, Luca, Annalisa, and Alessandro Botter, runs a company with 23.5 million litres of storage capacity, 452 fermentation tanks, and five bottling lines, drawing grapes from Veneto, Abruzzo, Campania, Puglia, and Sicily.

Botter owns vineyard sites on two fronts: La di Motte, planted along the Veneto-Friuli border near Motta di Livenza in the 1970s, and Masseria Doppio Passo, a newer estate in Puglia's Salice Salentino. Own-vineyard farming is organic across 160 hectares. The range is built around two collections, Le Guglie and Le Briccole, covering still and sparkling wines, with Prosecco at the centre of the sparkling offer.

Known for

Prosecco and multi-regional Italian still wines, including the Le Briccole Prosecco Rosé DOC blended from Glera and Pinot Nero.

Notable facts

The story

From Casks to Bottles

In the 1960s, Arnaldo and Enzo Botter inherited a wine business built on casks and demijohns. Their parents, Carlo and Maria, had spent more than thirty years filling barrels and selling them to local buyers: no labels, no retail presence, no export ambition. When the brothers took over, they made a single decision that ended that model. They stopped selling in bulk and shifted to bottled wine. The casks went. The demijohns went. In their place came bottles with labels, which meant retail accounts, which meant the company needed a brand instead of a product. That pivot turned a regional bulk merchant into a producer capable of reaching shelves outside the Veneto, and eventually outside Italy. The cellar address has not moved from Fossalta di Piave since 1928. The business it houses is barely recognisable from the one Carlo and Maria built.

From the atlas

Casa Vinicola Botter

At A Glance

The Producer

Carlo Botter and his wife Maria opened a small wine shop in Fossalta di Piave in 1928, selling wine in casks and demijohns to local buyers. The cellar is still at Via L. Cadorna 17, in the same northeastern Veneto town near Venice where the business began. What has changed is everything else.

Today the third generation of the family, Luca, Annalisa, and Alessandro Botter, runs a company with 23.5 million litres of storage capacity, 452 fermentation tanks, and five bottling lines. Botter draws grapes from Veneto, Abruzzo, Campania, Puglia, and Sicily. It owns vineyard sites on two of those fronts: La di Motte, planted along the Veneto-Friuli border in Motta di Livenza, and Masseria Doppio Passo, a newer estate in Puglia's Salice Salentino. The own-vineyard farming is organic across 160 hectares.

The range is built around two collections, Le Guglie and Le Briccole, covering still and sparkling wines. Prosecco is at the centre of the sparkling offer.

Place

Fossalta di Piave sits in the flat, alluvial plain of the northeastern Veneto, between Venice and the foothills that climb toward Treviso and the Prosecco-producing hills further north. The Po plain here is Glera country at scale: the Prosecco DOC zone covers a wide lowland arc from the Veneto into Friuli, and Botter's La di Motte site sits on the border between those two regions near Motta di Livenza.

That border position matters for the La di Motte wines. The vineyards draw on the alluvial soils common to this stretch of northeastern Italy, and the proximity to Friuli gives the site a cooler, airier microclimate than the flatter, warmer ground further south. Farther down the peninsula, Masseria Doppio Passo in Puglia's Salice Salentino occupies an entirely different landscape: hot, dry, calcareous terrain suited to the bold, sun-driven reds of the deep south, where Negroamaro and Primitivo are the dominant grapes.

Botter works across several Italian regions. The Veneto home base anchors the sparkling programme. Puglia and the other sourcing regions extend the still wine offer southward.

Soil And Site

La di Motte occupies the alluvial plain on the Veneto-Friuli border, where river-deposited soils of varying clay and gravel content support Glera and other northeastern Italian varieties. The site runs to 160 hectares of organically farmed vines.

Masseria Doppio Passo in Salice Salentino sits on the limestone-heavy soils of Puglia's Salento peninsula, where summer heat and low rainfall concentrate fruit in the local red varieties. With 1,500 hectares reported, it is a large southern estate by any measure.

Story

Carlo and Maria Botter built the business one cask at a time. Through the 1930s and 1940s, the model was straightforward: buy wine, fill containers, sell them locally. When the second generation took over in the 1960s, brothers Arnaldo and Enzo changed the business model. They shut down the barrel-sales trade and shifted to bottled wine, pointing the company toward retail shelves and export markets rather than bulk buyers. That decision transformed a regional wine merchant into a producer with a brand, a range, and a market beyond the Veneto.

The 1970s brought La di Motte. The site was planted near Motta di Livenza, on the boundary with Friuli, and named as a tribute to Maria, who came from Friuli. Her region and her name were embedded in the geography. The Masseria Doppio Passo estate in Puglia followed later, giving the company its southern anchor.

Luca, Annalisa, and Alessandro Botter now carry the third generation of that arc, managing a company whose scale would have been unimaginable to Carlo and Maria in 1928 but whose family continuity remains visible in the ownership and in the Fossalta di Piave address.

Vineyards And Cellar

Organic farming governs the 160 hectares of own-vineyard land. No synthetic pesticides or herbicides enter the rows at La di Motte or in Puglia, which keeps the soil biology active and reduces chemical residue in the fruit. In a large-volume operation, the choice to farm organically across all estate vines is a deliberate commitment rather than a marketing annotation.

The cellar infrastructure at Fossalta di Piave is built for large-volume production: 452 fermentation tanks allow separate handling of parcels, varieties, and regional lots, which is essential for a range drawing on five Italian regions. Five bottling lines move finished wine into bottle at a pace that matches the production scale. The fermentation tank count matters because it allows temperature control and lot separation that a smaller array could not achieve at this volume.

Wines

Botter's range divides into two collections, Le Guglie and Le Briccole, sharing wine types across both but directing them toward different occasions and table settings. The range covers still whites, still reds, and sparkling wines drawn from Veneto, Abruzzo, Campania, Puglia, and Sicily.

The sparkling wines are the most clearly documented. Le Briccole includes a Prosecco Rosé DOC, a blend of Glera and Pinot Nero from Veneto. The Glera gives the wine its Prosecco character: fresh, light, with low tannin and the soft mousse characteristic of the Charmat method used across the denomination. The Pinot Nero adds a faint pink colour and a gentle red-fruit lift without pushing the wine toward a fuller, more vinous character. It is described as dry and soft, with a round, full-bodied profile for a sparkling wine. A separate Le Briccole sparkling cuvée, classified as vino spumante brut, also appears on the official range.

The still wine offer extends across the Italian sourcing network. Abruzzo, Campania, Puglia, and Sicily each contribute varieties suited to their climates and soil types, though the individual grape compositions and cuvée names for those wines sit outside what the current verified sources document in detail.

In The Glass

The Le Briccole Prosecco Rosé DOC opens with the light, delicate aromatic lift typical of Glera-based sparkling wine: white peach, pear, and a faint floral note that comes from the variety's natural perfume. The Pinot Nero blend adds a pale copper-pink colour and a gentle red-fruit suggestion, somewhere between strawberry and light raspberry, without adding weight or tannin.

In the mouth, the mousse is soft and persistent rather than aggressive, which keeps the wine from feeling sharp on entry. The acidity is moderate, holding the dryness in balance with the round, full-bodied character the official description flags. The finish is short and clean, as expected for a wine built on Glera. There is no oak character, no residual sweetness, and no significant contribution from the Pinot Nero beyond its colour and gentle fruit contribution.

The Prosecco Rosé is a wine for drinking young, at aperitivo or with light food, where its freshness and soft mousse are assets. It does not ask for age.

A Bottle To Understand It

Start with the Le Briccole Prosecco Rosé DOC. It is made from Glera and Pinot Nero and is identified as a Veneto wine. The blend is Glera-dominant, so the wine leads with the soft mousse and white-fruit freshness the grape reliably produces, with the Pinot Nero contributing colour and a faint red-fruit tone without changing the wine's fundamental lightness. Serve it cold, shortly after purchase, and it will show exactly what Botter does with its home region: fresh, uncomplicated, correctly made, and built for a table.

Anecdote

In the 1960s, Arnaldo and Enzo Botter inherited a wine business built on casks and demijohns. Their parents, Carlo and Maria, had spent more than thirty years filling barrels and selling them to local buyers: no labels, no retail presence, no export ambition. When the brothers took over, they made a single decision that ended that model. They stopped selling in bulk and shifted to bottled wine. The casks went. The demijohns went. In their place came bottles with labels, which meant retail accounts, which meant the company needed a brand instead of a product. That pivot turned a regional bulk merchant into a producer capable of reaching shelves outside the Veneto, and eventually outside Italy. The cellar address has not moved from Fossalta di Piave since 1928. The business it houses is barely recognisable from the one Carlo and Maria built.

Final Word

Botter is a large-scale Italian wine company with a specific family origin and a documented arc from 1928 to the present. It is honest about what it is: a multi-regional producer with industrial capacity and a broad range, anchored by a Veneto home, organic estate vineyards, and a Prosecco-centred sparkling programme.

Sources

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