Nino Franco

Forget everything the bottomless brunch taught you about Prosecco. This is where the case for taking it seriously begins.

Nino Franco sits in the town of Valdobbiadene, at the steep top end of the Prosecco hills in Veneto, and for a century it has been quietly making the same argument: that Glera, grown on the right slope and handled with intent, is a real wine — not a cheerful afterthought you pour without thinking. The house Brut, Rustico, is one of the reference bottles for the entire category. Dry, mineral, precise. When people who care about Prosecco want to show you what the good stuff tastes like, this is very often the bottle they reach for.

A century on the hardest hills

Start with the ground, because the ground is the whole difference. Real Valdobbiadene isn't the flat, industrial Prosecco DOC that floods the world; it's the vertiginous, hand-worked hillsides of Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG — slopes so steep the growers coined a name, viticoltura eroica, heroic viticulture, for the work of farming them. In 2019 UNESCO put the whole landscape on its World Heritage list. Nino Franco has been at the top of it, in the town of Valdobbiadene, since the house was founded in 1919.

The man who turned a good family firm into a benchmark was Primo Franco, who took the reins in the early 1980s and spent the next decades pushing the wines drier, tauter and more serious while most of the region chased volume and sweetness. He treated Glera like a grape worth pedigree — single hillsides, later picking, a bottle bearing his own name to make the point. That refusal to dumb it down is the house's real inheritance, and it's why the name carries weight on lists where Prosecco usually gets no respect at all.

Most Prosecco is made to disappear into a Tuesday. Nino Franco makes it to be tasted on purpose.

The wines

Short, clear range — and a clear staircase up through it.

Start with the Rustico. It's the signature Valdobbiadene Superiore Brut and the wine that made the name: bone-dry, a fine bright bead, white peach and green apple and acacia, a saline snap on the finish that most Prosecco simply doesn't have. This is the honest, everyday way into the house, and it over-delivers every time.

Primo Franco is the step up in ripeness and ambition. Named for the man himself, it comes from later-harvested fruit and lands a touch off-dry — rounder, more perfumed, still fundamentally elegant. It's the bottle that shows Glera can carry a little flesh without turning into dessert.

Grave di Stecca is the flagship and the outlier. A Brut drawn from a single walled vineyard around the family villa, it was made to answer the sneer that Prosecco can't have depth — more texture, more structure, a wine you can sit with rather than just sip. This is the one to chase.

And if you want to taste the appellation's summit, there's the Cartizze — fruit off that tiny, absurdly steep, absurdly prized hill above the town, the closest thing Prosecco has to a grand cru. Softer and more opulent by tradition, it's the region showing off.

The setting

Everything here is shaped by slope and altitude. The Valdobbiadene hills fold and pitch in every direction, which is why the appellation carved out its rive — named single-slope subzones that mark fruit off one specific hillside, the local answer to a cru. Cooler nights and constant air movement keep Glera's acidity and floral lift intact, and Nino Franco works almost entirely in the tank method, the metodo Martinotti, precisely to preserve that fresh, primary fruit rather than bury it under bready complexity. The result is a wine about clarity and drive, not weight.

Around it runs the Strada del Prosecco, the road from Conegliano to Valdobbiadene that was Italy's very first official wine route back in 1966 — a ready-made way to read the landscape by driving it.

Visiting

Serious Prosecco houses aren't walk-in cellar doors as a rule, so treat a visit here as something you arrange ahead rather than stumble into. Book directly, confirm the current format, and plan your day around whatever they offer rather than the other way round. Confirm before you travel — house policies change.

Can't get inside? Don't over-invest in the booking. Drive up through the vineyards to Cartizze for the view, then let the bottles do the rest — they travel far better than the appointment calendar does.

What to buy

Let the occasion decide, then match the bottle to it. For the house at its most useful — an apéritif, a plate of cicchetti, a Tuesday that deserves better — the Rustico is the easy, over-delivering yes, and the fastest way to understand why this estate matters. If you want Prosecco with actual depth to sit with, reach for Grave di Stecca, the single-vineyard flagship and the house at full stretch. And if you're chasing the summit of the appellation itself, the Cartizze is fruit off the most coveted hill in the region — the one bottle that lets you taste what all that heroic climbing is for.