Prosecco col esterno - Costadilà 280slm

White, red and rosé wines can have bubbles - so why not orange? It hadn't crossed my mind that such a fascinating sub-genre might exist, but it does. Ernesto Cattel might well have been one of the first to bring it to market - his Costadilà estate on th

(Almost) every week, I select an orange wine (a white wine made with extended skin contact) that grabbed my attention. View the whole series here.

White, red and rosé wines can have bubbles - so why not orange? It hadn't crossed my mind that such a fascinating sub-genre might exist, but it does. Ernesto Cattel might well have been one of the first to bring it to market - his Costadilà estate on the Northern slopes of Valdobbiadene was founded in 2006, to showcase the more traditional face of Prosecco.

"Col Fondo", literally translating as "with the bottom", is essentially Prosecco's equivalent of a  pet(illant) nat(urel) - so unlike its mass-produced cousin, made using the cheap and cheerful charmat (tank) method, a col fondo is allowed to referment in the bottle on its own yeast lees. The result is a cloudy and much more characterful spumante. Cattel took this one step further from the 2009 vintage, when he started doing a skin maceration of 25 days for 280slm.