Prosecco land, just two hours northwest of Venice. Cin cin! Ruggeri Vineyard won the award for best sparkling wine of the year 2016 from the respected Gambero Rosso, whose trusted guides rate wines and restaurants. To taste this elixir, we’ve come by train, from Cortona to Mestre, seedy gateway to Venice, and picked up a car. Would it really be so much trouble to put up some signs in that chaos of a train station? We find the rental car agency not in the station at all but about a block down an iffy street where men are loitering and drinking.
At least the exit from the city is easy. Soon we are maneuvering the roundabouts, aiming toward Valdobbiadene—Val-doh-BE-ah-den-a—what a fun word to pronounce, and to Villa Sandi, a top vineyard and restaurant with seven rooms upstairs. Since our room isn’t ready, we have an early lunch on the covered terrace. Barely seated, we’re handed a cold flute of Villa Sandi prosecco. The tables are set with flowered crockery plates, each one different, and vintage crocheted and lace tablecloths. Across the lawn, hundreds of cyclists gather to register for a race tomorrow and to enjoy some wine and live music. American songs accompany scrumptious truffled gnocchi with a light guinea hen sauce: Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell—we could sing along.
THE SMALL BEDROOM has an alpine feel: cabinets of unfinished wood, plank floor, and a rustic bed with drifty mosquito netting. In the Gambero Rosso, we often look at recommended restaurants that have the little bed symbol. It’s nice to have dinner and not have to drive. Climb the stairs and buona notte. The rooms are usually simple, as this one is, but satisfying for a night.
After a quick settling in, we leave to find that primo Giustino B. prosecco—only three minutes away.
ALREADY AT THE door when we arrive, Paolo Bisol steps out to greet us. In a pale floral shirt, he looks more like an artist than a man of the land. Slender and quick, he has warm brown eyes that instantly reveal a sense of humor. We hop in his Land Rover and bounce along narrow roads, looking straight up and down at steep vineyards, then turn onto the roughest, rockiest track I’ve ever been on. The car lurches and bumps. We pull up to a panoramic point of the vineyard where he brakes beside a gnarled four-hundred-year-old chestnut tree in a clearing.
He points to a large boulder with embedded fossils, then to a tall upside-down conical structure he calls a cannone, a cannon. We can see two others in the distance. “Stops the hail,” he explains. To our quizzical looks he shrugs. “Diccono,” so they say. “There’s some merit. The theory is that gas is siphoned into the cone and we make a sort of explosion that blows up and rearranges the air.”
From our experience with olives, we know that hail is the most feared of the weather phenomena. Any desperate measure is worth trying.
La vendemmia, the harvest, started early this year because of intense summer heat and little rain. He’s not trimmed back the foliage at all. The grapes needed the protection of the leaves. In the lush and green vineyards, golden bunches catch the sun and glow as though each little globe is luminescent. We sample as we go. A ladder made from a split log with rungs notched into the wood testifies to the long tradition of the hands-on life in the vineyard. Paolo shows us a section of twisted and gnarled vines seventy to a hundred years old; they produce a special vintage.
Returning to the office, we follow trucks piled with grapes. They line up at the back of the building. Paolo’s vivacious daughter Isabella joins us but rushes off; she’s setting up food on a long table for the harvesters. Growers drive up to a stainless-steel bin just the length of the side of the truck. With a marvelous whoosh, the grapes fall in, while a man with a long pitchfork helps ease them into the revolving crusher.
“Like looking at the fire,” one worker observes as we stand watching the late-afternoon sun angling over the tumbling bunches. Paolo quotes Galileo, “Il vino e la luce del sole tenuta insieme dall’acqua.” “Wine is sunlight held together by water.”
Upstairs in his sleek conference room, we taste, don’t talk much, letting the Giustino B. speak. “One hundred percent glera grapes. Named for my father, who started the vineyard. Not the more floral style of other areas,” he comments. I agree. There’s a glass shelf of fossils on display and I imagine that a touch of minerality comes from the ancient shells deep in the soil. “Giustino B. is a reference point for all prosecco,” Gambero Rosso asserts. High praise, justified. We select a mixed case of Ruggeri wines and prosecco to share with Tuscan friends.
VILLA SANDI IS overrun by the sleek and taut cyclists dining together. We expect a rowdy evening but they dine quietly and leave early. The beamed stone room looks inviting and the lacy tablecloths don’t come off as dowdy, but charming instead. We order the pollo alle brace, a splayed grilled chicken (like our old favorite chicken-under-a-brick) with roasted vegetables and potatoes. Browned and juicy, the chicken is perfetto, with a bottle of Villa Sandi’s big Còrpore.
A HARD START to the race. It’s pouring; no blue breaking through the clouds. We wave; the cyclists have their heads down. Doubtlessly cursing. From the vantage of the car, the hills look dreamy in the rain. Onward from Valdobbiadene, a blessed area. Besides our friends at Ruggeri and Villa Sandi, many wine magicians perform their sorcery in these glera-covered hills: Bisol, Adami, Bortolomiol, and dozens of others.
We keep two bottles on the backseat for tonight. Farther south, we’ll be toasting with a friend.