Rosé, Col Fondo Prosecco, And A New Lease On (Wine) Life

The calendar has tipped over into May, which means we’ve landed in a season of refreshes and “firsts” of the year. Spring sunshine, at least here in the northern hemisphere, grants us our first warmed-by-the-sun feeling on our skin. We tuck away heavy winter blankets, sweaters and coats in favor of the first lighter layers of summer living.

And for wine lovers, the early days of May likely mean a first splash of rosé in our glasses and a gravitational pull toward lighter, refreshing wines that remind us of the buoyancy of spring. To mark the daybreak of a new season, I’d like to shed fresh light onto two iconic wines [rosé and Prosecco] that you’re likely to come across right now, either on retailer shelves or by-the-glass lists in restaurants or on the tables of friends hosting brunch and cocktail hour get-togethers: Italian rosé (or rosa) called Chiaretto, particularly from the Bardolino DOC near Lake Garda, and an utterly beguiling iteration of Prosecco called Col Fondo.

With today’s post, we start this mini-series with Col Fondo. That’s appropriate, given Col Fondo’s history as an older and more traditional way to make Prosecco. Most Prosecco is made in the charmat method, which was invented in 1895 and patented in 1910 as a secondary fermentation process (that’s what gives Prosecco its bubbles) taking place in large pressurized stainless steel tanks. In the Col Fondo style, by contrast, the secondary fermentation happens in the bottle, one bottle at a time rather than all at once in the large tanks. That slower, more individual approach yields an end result of wines that are practically temperamental in their uniqueness.

The Col Fondo style also yields exponentially fewer bottles to send to market. Col Fondo predates the mechanization and technology of the twentieth century, which has enabled the wildly popular success of most Prosecco today, to the tune of literally hundreds of millions of bottles. Bele Casel, on the other hand, is one of the most recognized producers of the Col Fondo style and their production (of all of their Prosecco labels in total) is just a few hundred thousand bottles.

The insistence on producing Col Fondo, in other words, is a statement and a resistance-against-mass-production in itself. It can also be summarized by a gesture.

Bele Casel, ColFondo Agricolo 2021

There is a gesture to this wine — namely, to gently and slowly turn the entire bottle bottom to top before you open it — that reveals the nature and history of its production.

It seems odd: why “shake” (however gently) a bottle of sparkling wine? Bele Casel’s recommendation, however, is to do exactly that, and it’s part of what makes this wine and this style so compelling. Turning the bottle upside down intentionally clouds the wine by dislodging the lees that had settled at the bottom of the bottle. (”Col Fondo” translates from the Italian as “from the bottom,” and the wine was unfiltered, leaving the sediment to settle.) The result, when poured into the glass, is yeasty, sour and, for me, far more savory and inviting than most overly-sweet Proseccos available on the market. The finish lingers from wine made in the Col Fondo style, as if the cloudiness generated from the gesture of upending the wine needs time and patience to clear. The Col Fondo style is temperamental, and the wine “practically behaves like a human,” said Paola Ferraro from Bele Casel. “Every bottle is a little bit different, and we’re just not sure what will happen.”

The finish is slightly and appealingly bitter, leaving the impression of a wine with identity, that had something to say and a history to tell, unapologetically. The wine has been made this way for decades by this family, nestled in the customs of the Asolo DOCG; it was made with passion, surely, but even moreso it was made with satisfaction and certainty of their tradition.

That sense of satisfaction is a common thread we’ll find in the remainder of this series, as we turn next to Chiaretto rosé and the “daybreak” of seeing a seasonal wine in a different light.