The hillsides that produce Prosecco Superiore are so steep that roughly 600 hours of manual labour are required per hectare each year — no machine can work them. Growers call this viticoltura eroica, heroic viticulture. The ropes, ladders and hand-carried crates are not heritage theatre. They remain the only practical method. The region runs between the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, some 60 kilometres north of the lagoon. Wine has been recorded here since Roman writers described the local vintages of the Colli Asolani. The Glera grape, once called Prosecco after a village near Trieste, was renamed in 2009 when the denomination was restructured. Italy's first school of oenology opened in Conegliano in 1876 and still trains winemakers. The Strada del Prosecco, established in 1966, was the country's earliest signposted wine route. In July 2019 UNESCO inscribed the Conegliano Valdobbiadene hills on the World Heritage list, citing the ciglioni — narrow grassed terraces cut across the slopes — and the checkerboard mosaic of vineyard, woodland and hamlet. Any prosecco tasting from venice now enters a protected cultural landscape rather than simple farmland. What distinguishes the appellation is method. The Charmat or Martinotti process, refined at Conegliano, conducts the second fermentation in pressurised steel autoclaves rather than in bottle, preserving the aromatics of green apple, white peach and acacia blossom that a long lees ageing would mask. Within the DOCG sit narrower classifications: Rive, denoting single steep-slope parcels from 43 named communes, and Cartizze, an 108-hectare cru above Valdobbiadene often described as the most valuable agricultural land in Italy. Sugar levels — brut nature, extra brut, brut, extra dry, dry — read counterintuitively, with extra dry sweeter than brut. The villages hold their own record. San Pietro di Barbozza, Santo Stefano, Guia and Col San Martino cluster around parish churches and cooperative cellars. Follina keeps a Cistercian abbey founded in the twelfth century, its cloister carved with mismatched columns. Asolo, twenty minutes west, drew Robert Browning and Eleonora Duse. Frescoes attributed to the school of Cima da Conegliano survive in local chapels, their landscapes recognisably these same hills. Cellars range from family holdings of three hectares to structured estates receiving visitors by appointment; several occupy converted barchesse, the long open-arcaded barns of Venetian villa farms. Free access to the road itself has always been the region's quiet argument: the landscape costs nothing to enter, and a prosecco tasting from venice remains, at bottom, a drive into working countryside.