The Two Sisters: Particella 68 & the Cartizze Argument
On the steep golden slopes of Valdobbiadene, Antonella and Ersiliana Bronca run one of the denomination's most respected estates — organic since the 1990s, family-scaled, and precise enough to make the region's most coveted wine, Cartizze, and its most beloved cult bottle, Particella 68. Proof that the prosecco hills' highest level does not require the prosecco mainstream's methods.
Origin — The Sisters' Inheritance, Chosen Freely
The Bronca family grew grapes on the Valdobbiadene hills for generations, selling fruit into the same anonymous stream that fed the denomination's boom. When the sisters took over in the 1990s, they chose a different course: estate bottling, organic farming, and a cellar run to their own standard — Antonella's hands in the vineyard, Ersiliana's in the cellar, the family's name on every label.
The conversion was early and unglamorous. Organic certification in the 1990s, on steep hand-farmed hills, with no premium waiting at the end of it — only conviction. The sisters farmed without chemistry because they believed the hills asked for it, and they made precise, site-driven wines because that was the work they respected. The market caught up with them later.
The estate's reputation now spans the denomination's full spectrum: from the everyday Valdobbiadene DOCG to the super-premium Cartizze cru, and the cult single-parcel wine — Particella 68 — named for the hillside plot the family registered generations ago. Few estates anywhere hold that range with this consistency; fewer still run it as a two-woman command.
The Place — The Golden Steep of Valdobbiadene
The family's vineyards occupy the denomination's heartland — the steep morainic hills around Valdobbiadene where the DOCG's best rive climb, and where one small amphitheater, Cartizze, commands the highest prices in Italian sparkling wine. The Bronca holdings are family ground of long standing: old pergola Glera on slopes farmed by hand, organically, across roughly twenty hectares.
Organic Since the 1990s
The estate's organic farming predates the denomination's sustainability fashion by decades: no herbicides, no synthetic treatments, living cover between the rows, compost and care in place of the agronomist's schedule. On slopes this steep, organic farming is also simply harder — every pass is by hand, every treatment carried up the hill. The sisters carried it anyway.
Particella 68 — the Family's Archive Plot
Among the family's parcels is a hillside registered generations ago under the number 68 — old vines on a favored exposure, whose wine the sisters bottle separately as Particella 68. It became a cult bottle almost by accident: a wine made because the plot deserved it, discovered by sommeliers who recognized that this was what old-vine Valdobbiadene could really do.
Cartizze, Taken Seriously
The family's holdings touch Cartizze — the tiny amphitheater whose grapes fetch the denomination's top prices and whose name decorates a thousand ordinary bottles elsewhere. At Sorelle Bronca the cru is treated with understatement: old vines, organic farming, minimal handling — the sisters' argument that Cartizze should taste of Cartizze, not of marketing.
Steep-Hill Craft
Everything on these hills is manual: harvest by hand in small crates, multiple passes for ripeness, fruit moved by cable and leg rather than machine. The family scale keeps the work honest — every row is known, every vintage walked. The precision sommeliers praise in the glass begins as logistics on the slope.
Winemaking — Precision Without Dogma
The Bronca cellar is meticulous rather than dogmatic: gentle pressing, slow fermentations, patient lees work, and an allergy to excess sugar. The estate is not a natural wine provocation — it belongs to the careful wing of the denomination — but its restraint is real: minimal intervention where the fruit allows it, no cosmetic corrections, and a house style built on dryness, acidity, and site.
The style across the range is unmistakable: chiseled, citrus-driven, mineral prosecco with the structure of the steep hills in it — wines that finish dry and precise rather than fruity and soft. Particella 68 in particular reads more like a serious white Burgundy that happens to sparkle: orchard fruit, crushed stone, a long savory line.
The philosophy, in the sisters' own implicit grammar: farm the hills as if the next generation will inherit them — because one did. Everything at the estate, from the organic rows to the unsweetened style, follows from treating the family ground as a trust rather than a resource.
The Wines — The Full Height of the Hills
A range that climbs the denomination's entire ladder — the estate DOCG, the cult parcel, the Cartizze apex — in one house style: dry, precise, site-driven.
Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG
The estate wine — the house style in its daily registerThe introduction and the workhorse: organic Glera from the family's hills, gently pressed, slowly fermented, finished dry and precise. Citrus, white flowers, crushed stone — the steep-hill signature with nothing softening it. The bottle that taught a generation of sommeliers to take the sisters seriously. ~11.5% ABV.
Particella 68
The cult parcel — old vines, single siteThe estate's argument and its legend: the family's old registered hillside plot, bottled alone. Deeper, denser, and more mineral than the estate wine — orchard fruit, struck flint, a long savory line that belongs as much to fine white Burgundy as to prosecco. Scarce, allocated, and worth every hunt. ~12% ABV.
Cartizze & the Crus
The apex — the denomination's most coveted ground, taken seriouslyFrom the family's Cartizze ground: the tiny amphitheater's grapes handled with the same understatement as everything else here — old vines, organic rows, minimal handling, and a finish that is drier and more mineral than the cru's fruity reputation suggests. The sisters' corrective to Cartizze-as-logo. ~11.5% ABV.
Legacy — Rewriting Who the Hills Answer To
Sorelle Bronca's legacy is a widened frame of reference. When the sisters took over, the denomination's serious tier was assumed to belong to large houses and consultant enology. The estate demonstrated otherwise: that family scale, organic farming, and two women's judgment could reach the same heights — Cartizze included — without the industrial apparatus.
Particella 68 gave the legacy its sharpest instrument: a single-parcel wine that helped invent terroir-driven prosecco as a category, and that remains the benchmark against which the denomination's site-specific bottlings are judged. Every rive wine and cru bottling that followed works in the opening the sisters made.
And the legacy is representational — quietly consequential in a denomination where leadership has rarely worn a woman's face. Two sisters running an estate at the top of the prosecco world, without slogans and without concessions, changed what the next generation assumes is possible on these hills. The parcel had a number. Now it has heirs.