There is a beautifully quiet corner of north-east Italy, the landscape punctuated by sleepy hamlets and sweeping hills that climb into the distant green Dolomites vaulting over the horizon. It is a suitably glamorous place for one of the biggest models on the planet to find one of the world’s great wines. The model? Cara Delevingne. The wine? Cartizze. And for those put off Prosecco after years of acrid supermarket plonk, this might be the Italian fizz to get back into bed with. And, if you want to be ahead of the curve, it’s the thing to serve this summer.
Cartizze — that’s car-teets-eh out loud — is shorthand for this wine, which is the pinnacle of Prosecco, but it’s also a sub-region within Valdobbiadene, Vento. Stay with me. Totalling a little over 105 hectares, this is hallowed ground in Italian viticulture, the primest of prime real estate. Only 125 or so vineyards manage the territory, producing around 1.2 million bottles per year. Sounds a lot? Not compared with the near-700 million bottles of total annual Prosecco output.
The wine’s full — read, very Italian — title is Valdobbiadene Superiore di Cartizze DOCG. Even the name is a good hint that it’s a fair bit more special than what the UK usually knocks back, which is Prosecco DOC Treviso. Consider Cartizze the ‘grand cru’ of Prosecco, a highly prized and highly refined wine of small and delicate bubbles.
The flavours are subtle floral notes of white rose; delicate fruits of white peach; and green apple and pear which mellow with hints of honey, cucumber and basil. Bottled no more than a year from harvest, it is in essence a mayfly, designed to be beautifully expressive and intentionally short-lived; a firework flash of brilliance and a pure demonstration of terroir, created for immediate consumption.
In true Italian fashion, there is a secret society of winemakers within Valdobbiadene. This cloaked confraternity gather each year to blind taste hundreds of these wines, judging and deciding on the year’s best. It’s ancient, Masonic stuff — and Cartizze invariably comes out on top. Maybe that’s why, until now, they’ve kept it to themselves.
Delevingne may now be proudly sober but she and her sisters Chloe and Poppy (left, with Cara) sell their own, launched a couple of years back in partnership with the Foss Marai estate. The Delevingnes leave the winemaking to the experts but lend their name to the labelling, bottling and marketing. The wine is called Della Vite, left, (“of the vine”, but also a riff on their surname), and sells for circa £19 in Harvey Nichols, Selfridge’s and John Lewis.
It may not be brand new, but the sisters’ operation let the secret out and now there are other Cartizze wines to seek out. Michelin-starred Locanda Locatelli is a good place to start, and the aptly-named Prosecco House by Tower Bridge shows off a lot of other wines from the region.
At home? Plenty of online wine merchants keep the stuff in stock — or swing by Eataly by Liverpool Street station, where La Rivetta Cartizze Villa Sandi is about £25.It might be the most expensive Prosecco you’ll buy this summer, but it’ll almost certainly be the best.
