The Steep Hills Time Forgot: Col Fondo & the Follador Inheritance
On the impossibly steep slopes above Santo Stefano di Valdobbiadene, Loris Follador farms the vineyards his grandfather Amadio refused to spray — land that skipped the chemical revolution of the 1960s entirely. The result is Prosecco as it was before industrialization: hand-harvested Glera from old pergola vines, fermented with native yeasts and finished col fondo — cloudy, dry, savory, and alive in the bottle it was born in.
Origin — The Grandfather Who Said No
The post-war decades remade the Prosecco hills. As Italy industrialized, growers were sold a package: herbicides to kill the grass, fertilizers to push yields, factories to ferment the harvest. Amadio Follador declined the package. On his slopes above Santo Stefano di Valdobbiadene he kept mowing by hand, manuring by judgment, and treating the vineyard as a garden rather than a crop. Neighbors thought him backward. His vineyard kept its old vines, its mixed plantings, and its living soil — a time capsule nobody intended to leave behind.
His grandson Loris Follador grew up inside that time capsule. Where most Valdobbiadene fruit flowed anonymously into cooperative blends and industrial Charmat, Loris understood that his inheritance was precisely what the market had erased: old pergola-trained Glera on living soils, in a place steep enough to keep machines out. He began bottling the estate's own wine under the family label, keeping the cellar protocol as old-fashioned as the farming: slow, ambient, unhurried.
The estate's name is a map reference — the coste, the little slopes, of the family parish — and its fame spread the way natural wine fame spread in those years: glass by glass, through the wine bars of Venice, Treviso, and beyond, until Casa Coste Piane became the shorthand answer to a question the Prosecco boom kept begging: what did this wine taste like before it became a brand?
The Place — Moraine, Pergola & the Vertical Harvest
Santo Stefano di Valdobbiadene sits in the heart of the DOCG's steepest amphitheater — hills thrown up by ancient glaciers, a mosaic of morainic sandstone and clay sculpted into slopes of 40 degrees and more. These are the rive country: small, steep, hand-worked hillsides whose wines the denomination now formally distinguishes. Casa Coste Piane's vineyards are a patchwork of such slopes, old pergola-trained vines planted by generations whose names are still on the terraces.
The Steepness Is the Point
Mechanization never arrived here because it never could. Every pass through the vineyard — pruning, tying, mowing, harvest — is done by hand, on slopes where a dropped crate rolls downhill. The reward for the punishment: vines rooted deep in poor, well-drained morainic soil, yields naturally restrained, and a harvest that can only ever be selective. The vineyard's difficulty is the wine's insurance policy.
Old Vines, Old Bones
The core plantings are old Glera on the traditional double-arched pergola, interplanted in the old manner with the companion varieties of the hills — Verdiso, Bianchetta, the occasional lost thing nobody replants anymore. Many vines are middle-aged by Prosecco standards and older by any other; all of them grow in soil that has never lost its biology to a herbicide spray.
Zero Chemistry, Zero Illusion
No herbicides — ever, in the estate's history. No synthetic fertilizers, no systemic treatments, no irrigation. The grass grows between the rows and is mown or turned under; the vines are fed by compost and patience. In a denomination where "sustainable" often means calibrated reduction, Coste Piane's farming is absolute — the floor, not the ceiling, of what they ask of the land.
A Living Cellar Under the House
The cellar works the way the vineyard does: slowly, by hand, at ambient temperature. Primary fermentation happens with native yeasts; the wines finish their second fermentation in the bottle, col fondo style — no autoclave, no dosage confections, no rush. Bottles rest on their lees until release, and the lees come along for the ride: the wine is neither fined nor filtered, so each bottle keeps its fine, savory cloud.
Winemaking — The Cloud Is the Signature
Casa Coste Piane's method is a refusal list. No selected yeasts, no temperature control, no fining, no filtration, no added sugar in the bottle. The Glera is pressed gently, fermented dry in old vessels, and bottled with a little of its own must — or a whisper of yeast — to start a slow second fermentation inside the sealed bottle. What Prosecco's industrial wing achieves in forty days of autoclave pressure, this cellar lets time accomplish over months: a gentle, persistent bead and a texture that pressure-tank Prosecco never achieves.
Sulfur is used sparingly if at all, and always at bottling rather than through the wine's life. The wine stays on its lees until the day it leaves the cellar, so every bottle is slightly cloudy — a feature, not a flaw, the visible signature of a living wine. The house style that emerges is unmistakable: dry to the point of austerity, stony, herbal, with a bitter-almond snap that reads more like an old Soave than a modern Prosecco.
It is, in other words, the wine this place made before anyone needed the word natural — and the proof that the col fondo revival of the last decade was less an invention than a memory.
The Wines — Prosecco With the Bones Showing
The range is deliberately narrow — a family cellar making the wine its hills actually give, rather than a portfolio built for export decks. Every bottling is col fondo at heart: dry, lees-aged, unfiltered, and a little wild.
Col Fondo
Prosecco Col Fondo — Valdobbiadene DOCGThe estate's argument and its calling card. Glera from the old pergola slopes, wild-fermented, refermented and matured in bottle on its lees — unfiltered, so pour carefully if you want it clear, roughly if you want it true. Dry, stony, and savory, with the bitter-almond finish of the great Conegliano-Valdobbiadene hillsides. The bottle to hand anyone who thinks they know what Prosecco tastes like. ~11% ABV.
Metodo Classico & Single-Parcel Selections
The Disgorged & the Named HillsidesAlongside the flagship cloud, the cellar bottles disgorged, zero-dosage versions for a finer bead, and parcels the family marks out as its best exposures — small-lot wines that map the differences between one slope and the next. Same protocol throughout: nothing added, nothing taken away, time doing the work the autoclave is asked to do elsewhere. ~11–11.5% ABV.
Magnums & Library Bottles
Col Fondo, Aged on LeesThe connoisseur's move: the same col fondo in large format and held back in the cellar, where the lees slowly turn stony austerity into something rounder — hazelnut, bruised orchard fruit, mountain herbs. A bottle that makes the case that col fondo was never the rustic poor cousin, but the long-ageing original of which tank Prosecco is the abbreviated version.
Legacy — The Memory the Boom Almost Erased
Casa Coste Piane matters because it held the door open. When Prosecco became the world's bestselling sparkling wine, its production model was rewritten around volume, consistency, and the autoclave — and the old way of the hills (bottle, lees, patience, cloud) was written off as peasant residue. The Follador family simply kept making it, on the same slopes, in the same bottles, decade after decade — until the wine world circled back and discovered that the residue was the point.
The estate's second legacy is precedent. Every young grower in the Conegliano-Valdobbiadene hills now bottling col fondo, fermenting with native yeasts, or refusing herbicides on a steep rive is working ground Casa Coste Piane never abandoned. It is the quiet elder of the denomination's natural wing — cited more often in cellar conversations than in press releases.
And its third legacy is a tasting lesson that reaches far beyond Prosecco: that the most radical thing a wine can be is continuous — the same wine, from the same vines, made the same way, while everything around it changes. Grandfather Amadio's refusal turned out to be the estate's entire innovation strategy.