Five hours in on day one of our eight in Italy last year with nine winemakers to see and Ernesto from Costadilà as number one and we'd only done two rows. Two rows each, sure, and there were five of us so that made the total ten but there was still twice that to go and that was just this parcel.
Treviso is Glera country. It's also perfect goat country: too steep for humans, no space for tractors. (There are no goats). Foothold is crumbly (sandstone, limestone, not much topsoil) and at other times there isn't any. Work goes slow. It's hot. Picking out the bad grapes means often snipping your fingers which are at all times sticky. Picking after drinking volatile bottles of Merlot from Ernesto's buddy Denny at lunch isn't a great idea. Nor are Birkenstocks.
Ernesto makes farmhouse prosecco with sunshine souls but formally, prosecco col fondo: a bottle-fermented, non-dosage, non-disgorged, unfiltered haze of an excuse to drink at breakfast (notes on the 280 slm.) His wines are nothing like 'I brought prosecco!'-prosecco, but everything like how prosecco should and used to be before the sugar-added, stainless-steel tank fermentation then heavy filtration-thing that's been giving girls the giggles, then headaches and belly acid since the '70s.
He experiments with oxididation, skin maceration and vinegar-ification. He has bottles lined up standing open for months — his very own acid station. I should also say he also makes red and tell you the story about his trials with winter-fication: how, when an importer sent back a pallet of Mat as faulty, he left it outside over winter because he didn't have space. Come spring, that importer bought that shit back. End of story.
Costadilà
‡
Tarzo, Italy, 2 October 2016
