Italy's first school of oenology opened in Conegliano in 1876, four decades before Glera had a legal name to defend. The hills its students surveyed run roughly forty kilometres west to Valdobbiadene, a corrugated band of moraine and marl about fifty kilometres north of the lagoon — the country a Prosecco Wine Tour from Venice climbs into. UNESCO inscribed the slopes in July 2019, citing hogback ridges, ciglioni grass terraces, and a mosaic of parcels still worked largely by hand. Legal order arrived late. Only in 2009 was the name Prosecco bound to place rather than grape, the historic core promoted to Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG and the old varietal renamed Glera. Forty-three rive — steep single-slope crus, each named for its hamlet — sit inside that appellation. Cartizze, the smallest and most contested, covers about 107 hectares above Santo Stefano, Saccol and San Pietro di Barbozza, land counted among the dearest farmland in Europe. Roughly 3,400 growers work the district, most of them holding under two hectares apiece. Method shapes the wine more than any cellar door admits. Second fermentation happens in pressurised steel autoclaves rather than in bottle, a technique patented by Federico Martinotti in 1895 and industrialised by Eugène Charmat, and it preserves the pear, white flower and green apple registers that long bottle ageing would trade for bread crust. A Prosecco Wine Tour from Venice tour therefore ends in a tank room, not a candlelit cellar. Slopes reach gradients near seventy per cent, so harvest stays manual by necessity; a single hectare can demand six hundred hours of work in a year. The bellussera trellis, devised in the 1880s against downy mildew, still carries vines overhead like rigging across the older parcels. The Strada del Prosecco, opened in 1966 between Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, was Italy's first signposted wine road, and it still dictates how visitors move through the district — past the Molinetto della Croda, a watermill built into the rock face at Refrontolo, and up to the porticoed centre of Asolo, where Robert Browning wintered and Eleonora Duse is buried. Conegliano Valdobbiadene winery tours and broader Veneto wine country itineraries all borrow those ridgelines. Access to the hills themselves is free, at 0 EUR, and the roads stay open around the clock; the gates that matter belong to private estates, which is what Prosecco Wine Tour from Venice tours are built to open.