Santa Margherita’s Prosecco Superiore D.O.C.G. celebrates its 70th anniversary: an extraordinary story from a unique terroir

Seventy years ago, Santa Margherita, realizing the potential of making Glera into a sparkling wine and that of its terroir of choice, the hills of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, started to produce Prosecco Superiore, thus joining the select group of pioneering wineries that contributed to the great success of this formidable ambassador for the Italian way of life. It did so following an intuition, no less than ten years before the creation of the zone’s Producers’ Consortium and seventeen years before the first Production Regulations were published for the Prosecco D.O.C..

In these first seventy years, the quest for excellence has never stopped: from being a pioneer, Santa Margherita has become a proud ambassador for top-quality production, making a proactive contribution to transforming a “local” bubbly into one of the world’s best-known and most popular sparkling wines.
There have been many changes and improvements in these seven decades, both in the vineyard and in the production processes in the winery, all highlighting the quality of the Glera grape and of the hills of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene.

On the one hand, the company has consolidated its presence in the D.O.C.G. with the acquisition of vineyards at Refrontolo and at San Pietro di Feletto, in the strip of foothills between Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, and with the inauguration, in 2011, of Tenuta di Refrontolo, situated in one of the 43 “Rive”, the exclusive sub-denominations that embody the finest distinctive local characteristics of Prosecco Superiore. This has allowed Santa Margherita to focus even more on the product and highlight the many stylistic differences of this wine, which was running the risk - given its explosion as a fashionable phenomenon in recent years - of becoming trivialized. On the other, the adoption of strict protocols in the vineyard and the use of avant-garde technology in the winery (which has always been state-of-the-art) have guaranteed total respect for the grapes and great consistency in the quality of production.