"Silvano Follador is in my opinion the single best producer of Prosecco today...Follador is a true master of the Glera grape variety and the 20,000 bottles of wine he makes a year... are much sought after by wine lovers and collectors."

—Ian d'Agata, Vinous

A bottle of something bubbly can be so much more than the keystone of a celebration. We mostly think of wine pairing as pretty binary — red meat with red wine and lighter fare with white wine. But a world of opportunity opens up when you consider pairing food with sparkling wines, be they Champagne, Cava or the finest Proseccos, like Silvano Follador’s. 

Siblings Silvano and Alberta Follador inherited 4 hectares of land in DOCG Valdobbiadene, the heart of Prosecco country, and began making wine immediately after secondary school. They employed a traditionally-minded wine consultant, but found the wines to be lacking in personality and pizzazz. So they started over from scratch. They ditched the consultant and began farming organically and biodynamically. They decided to produce only serious, and most importantly, dry Prosecco.

Some Prosecco is big business: cheap and cheerful bubbles for crowds, or maybe for mixing with OJ at brunch. To make wine on that scale and keep it cheap, producers work industrially, and they work fast: a bottle of mass-market Prosecco, fermented with highly optimized lab yeasts and pushed and pulled through various processes, can be released mere weeks after the grapes have been harvested. 

But the Folladors believe in taking their time. Their fruit undergoes a long, slow fermentation, with only indigenous yeast, which avoids homogenization and preserves terroir. And unlike many Prosecco producers, they ferment until the wine is incredibly, totally dry (and they don't add any sugar after the wine is finished). Each bottle is vintage-dated and comes from a single harvest. 

What does all of this mean on a practical level? It means that you're able to drink a bottle of fine Italian bubbles, with great purity of fruit and no cloying sweetness, one that's made with respect for the land and the fruit. You could drink a bottle as an apéro, or even turn it into a spritz. But really, this wine is calling out to be paired with food — try a bottle with your next fried chicken meal, or sushi, or pizza bianca. 

This wine offers so much more than delicate bubbles — its gentle acidity, white flower aromas and notes of peach and pear will play off foods both rich and light. It's so refreshing and heartening to find an example of well-made, artisanal Prosecco like this (and a critical favorite), and we're very excited to share it with you today.

Silvano Follador, Prosecco Brut Nature, 2018 

"...opens slowly in the glass, showing wild grasses and stone dust before giving way to hints of peach and pear. It’s soft in texture and dry, with a fine bead of soothing bubbles ushering in mineral-tinged green apples. Though subtle, this finishes with poise and an almost-salty character, leaving the palate perfectly cleansed for another sip." - Eric Guido, Vinous