Metal pulleys and wooden tension in the Cartizze in Prosecco's historic Conegliano-Valdobbiadene ... [+] zone

Before transforming his light-green-golden base wine to sparkling in the hilliest parts of the Veneto’s Treviso province, maker of biodynamic-guided Prosecco Superiore Francesco Drusian uses an American filtering machine in the following four phases: the liquid passes one or two times through a net of 5 micron meshes, once through a finer 2.5 micron framework, through one of 1 micron spaces, on through a 0.75 micron finale.

Every wine is an occasion of a primal technological relationship between people and grapevines. The kind that moves through the apparatuses above is an outcome specific to the historic Prosecco hills since the 20th century defined as the Conegliano-Valdobbiadene and Asolo DOCGs and tied more tightly to another kind of machine, which will change it into a sparkling wine defined by the amount of pressure it offers, a specific solution of liquid and gas obtainable in very few ways. The fulcrum of this technological relationship is the Prosecco method, one of the two main branches of the Italian or Martinotti method of sparkling-wine making and defined by the use of pressure-tight autoclaves shaped in stainless steel. In the Prosecco method, these vessels are shaped by and shape the demands of these hills’ easily obscured delicate grapes (thin-skinned and understatedly aromatic Glera and sometimes, in much smaller amounts, five-ish other native cultivars) which have for centuries with varying degrees of rigor circumscribed their wines. In keeping with his denomination’s production requirements, and in expression of an ever more current unpredictability made of drought or sudden rain or perfect harvests, using the Prosecco method Drusian meshes machine with each year’s fruit grown of centenarian Glera vines, but not only, in the Colbertaldo area at the western end of the zone’s Valdobbiadenese hills system. “The discriminating use of the most modern technologies,” markets the website of his New York importer. “No pesticides or insecticides are used on the vines and only organic and bio-dynamic are employed.” Moving from the past two centuries’ changing ways of vine-tending, through that stainless-steel autoclave (nonreactive, too) now more than a half-century past being coated “inox” (in more recent decades instead polished to remove impurities and smooth) which was “more expensive back then,” Drusian explained to me just before the pandemic began, past being enameled and more affordable cast iron that “contracts and cracks,” such examples of Prosecco Superiore wines are material instances of person, grape, machine meeting. They are, to stretch the words of speculative science writer Donna Haraway, “companion species [that] are relentlessly becoming with,” joyful, subtle, sparkling, and complicatedly hopeful machine-meshing pointed to also by the word cyborg.

“Cyborgs are not machines in just any sense, nor are they machine-organism hybrids,” Haraway writes in Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene of new compositions that can emerge as beautiful and kin-based solutions to climate change and other people-crises. “In fact, they are not hybrids at all. They are, rather, imploded entities, dense material semiotic ‘things’ — articulated string figures of ontologically heterogeneous, historically situated, materially rich, virally proliferating relatings of particular sorts, not all the time everywhere, but here, there, and in between, with consequences.” As a writer whose work inhabits and moves along patterns of wine, I see the stories of Prosecco Superiore as especially cyborg-proposing, as locations and signs for such consequential hopefulness and as an opportunity for parables. In that mixing with each year’s weather, Drusian begins by cryomacerating the grapes so that the flavors the grape-skins hold will express themselves more freely during the fermentation. Then for 70 to 80 minutes, his technicians crush, gently, less than 1 bar of pressure and therefore mechanically lower than the earth’s average air pressure at sea level, then wait for the earth’s gravitational force to settle the parts more solid than juice onto vats’ bottoms. To turn this all into that base wine, these more liquid results are inoculated with, meshing again, selected natural yeasts and left to ferment at lower temperatures of 17° to 18° C, for about 15 to 17 days. For the method’s second fermentation that transforms the wine to sparkling in that autoclave, Drusian’s start is around 12° C then onto 14° C for 70 to 90 days. In recent years, a special edition named “30 Raccolti,” from grapes harvested in 2017 — lemon notes and toasted brioche; bitter and leafs and petals — and in homage to their 30th year making Prosecco Superiore, gathered sparkling foam over 180 days, by way of those selected yeasts.

Drusian is one of several examples of these kinds of entanglement, one of the particularly cyborgian producers in cyborgian-possible Prosecco Superiore. Smaller-still makers such as Col del Lupo with grapes zone-wide and in Rolle, Col San Martino’s Riva Granda who lists her work as Valdobbiadene method, and Rugè in a steep turn of Valdobbiadene, along with bottlings from longer-guarding ones like Ruggeri or wider-spread like Perlage come to mind like this as well, and there are more and more small-scale fiercely vine-devoted producers not only of today’s fizzy “sui lieviti” typology that are made-in-bottle plays on days older and mistakenly imagined as less technical, but also of fully sparkling grape-machine wines. In Santo Stefano, Silvano Follador, widely regarded as one of the best interpreters of Prosecco and who has at least once turned to the classic bottle-made method in vintages that give difficult grapes, reserves the Prosecco method for all the better years. These are growers whose careful practices underline and guide-with the natures of these machines, reimaginings and reshapings of bottles to fit the nature of these grapes, turned to base wine for pouring into autoclave then rattling along isobaric bottling lines, raw materials forming and reimagined into a wine that is both natural and constructed, akin to what Haraway calls in her book’s optimistic climate-change stories, “material-semiotic worlding.” At around 5 times that average earth atmosphere at sea level at 59 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Celsius, the pressure indicated by the Superiore label of such wines marks each as a spumante — noun form of sparkling and a statement of those conditions of pressure, for which there is no English equivalent and which is a material with another set of implications. “Prosecco Conegliano-Valdobbiadene means basically sparkling wine of this area made mostly of Glera grapes,” Drusian pointed out. “What does that on a bottle mean, though? What’s missing from these highly site-sensitive grapes?”

His 80 hectares include a little Bianchetta Trevigiana — herbal, orchard fruit, and once far more widely grown here — coplanted in a higher area. Those older Glera vines in Colbertaldo have grown trucks that are fat and wide and not like those of their contemporaries growing lean and rangier less than an hour’s walk away in the Cartizze amphitheater which at an average of 1.8 million euro per hectare is among the world’s most expensive places to grow vines. They have always looked that way, Drusian told me his grandfather told him. In Combai, frazione of Miane, about 7 miles north with a slight shift east of Colbertaldo and where less sun can make a growing season too short for Glera, he has planted fellow native Perera, pear-blossom floral. The two blended-sites DOCG bottlings he makes are: acidity, in such volume with the pith and pleasant fresh ginger, some enriching hydrocarbon-y notes. An especially steep Rive di Santo Stefano in Colbertaldo is sharp, savory, and green, long finish, sharpened sparkle. His Cartizze reliably bigger-bodied, apple tart, bitterness; acidity is complex and sharpened, too, and woven into the relative heft. A blend of days, “Ruraglia,” made in tribute to some of the ways of making before this machine, is still very clean in taste, a little weighted from the lees, somewhat less complexity. One bottling includes, more old-fashionedly, all three grapes, but is made now by weather, tending habits, and machinery that did not exist for most of the times this was a more usual mix. “The task is to become capable with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response,” Haraway notes as ways out of the pessimism and “faith in technofixes” flooding our already crumbling world. Salis rock makes up many of the hilly top growing sites on this western edge. “String figures are like stories,” she guides, “they propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth.” The hilltops have river-carried sandstone soils, too. Morainic movement as both wines and lessons for optimism in this specific location of entanglement of fruit and sparkling wine. Of careful growing and of arduous machines. Prosecco Superiore wines are also examples of locations of both tradition and today’s hope, a locating that in its overt rebuttal to the falseness of timelessness is a position on place that is, to offer material hope when we need it most, what I like to think of as now-ist. “Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future,” Haraway offers as well.

Like most wine-grapevines of the 20th and 21-st centuries, those from which Prosecco Superiore is made are other entanglements, that are, to reweave Haraway’s words, historically situated, materially rich relatings of particular sorts, here, and heterogeneous. Due to another people-grapevine-crisis, in which millions of Europe’s vines died when phylloxera came from the eastern United States in the mid-19th century, the hundreds of varieties of near-East (to position temporarily) and European species vinifera (though less-threatened American species can benefit from this too), almost everywhere are scions, placed on a transplanting machine as to-be trunks, that is, grafted onto rootstocks neither their or their species’ own. Species, for example, like the American river-related Vitis riparia, rock-living rupestris, or deepening multispecies kin berlandieri x riparia. Drusian has propagated his old Colbertaldo vines via cuttings of them then grafted onto an old rootstock called R. Dulot (from which until 2018 Soave producer Inama in the Venetian province of Verona just east of Treviso offered their “opulent” Vigneto Du Lot bottling, graftings launched there in 1996) which operates to supply mineral and water nutrition and manufacture hormonal and organic substances while the vine powers it with the substances roots need to grow and with reserve starches for the winter. New-plantingwise, Dulot doesn’t exist anymore, because, Drusian says, it lasts too long and is therefore commercially nonviable. These changes coming from what is already here, enmeshings of viabilities and re-takings, are hopeful movements of “particular sorts of historically situated machines,” as writes Haraway, which “signaled by the words information and system play their part in cyborg living and dying.”

See Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, Duke University Press (2016).