Timeline
Once upon a time,
a little wine found its name.
Bella Principessa.More than bubbles in a bottle.
She’s a point of view.
It’s a tale with an empress, a poet, a chemist and a great many happy people raising a glass. Pour yourself one and start at the beginning.
Our History
Our story starts in Ancient Rome,
with an empress and her favorite wine.
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50 BCEAn Empress and Her Pucinum1
Empress Livia lived into her 82nd year and gave the credit to a wine called Pucinum, made near what’s now Prosecco country. Pliny the Elder wrote it all down, so we can still raise a glass to her.
Was Pucinum an early cousin of today’s Glera grape? History keeps that secret, and we like to imagine it was.
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1593A Village Called Prosecco2
An English traveler, Fynes Moryson, passes a little village on the hills above Trieste and finds its wine worth writing home about. The village is called Prosecco.
In time its name travels further than any traveler, and the grape and the wine come to share it.
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1754Prosecco Gets Its First Poem3
The poet Aureliano Acanti writes a merry drinking song, Il Roccolo Ditirambo, and Prosecco has a part in it. It’s one of the first times the name appears in print, and fittingly it’s in a song about wine.
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1868Antonio Carpenè Makes Prosecco Sparkle4
Antonio Carpenè, a chemist with big ideas, founds Carpenè Malvolti and sets out to make Prosecco sparkle. Today most Prosecco gets its bubbles in a sealed pressure tank, the Martinotti method.
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1876Italy’s First Wine School Opens Its Doors5
Carpenè helps found the Scuola Enologica di Conegliano, where young winemakers learn the craft. Its classrooms are still full of them today.
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Early 1900sThe Hills Come Into Their Own6
Families such as Adami tend the steep slopes of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, and their wine gets better with every harvest.
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1966Italy’s First Wine Road7
The Strada del Prosecco opens between Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, the first recognized wine road in Italy. Visitors can now wander from cellar to cellar through the hills.
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1999A Name We Believed In8Long before the boom
We registered Prosecco.com in November 1999, because we believed the whole world would one day fall for this name. And it has.
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2019The Prosecco Hills Join the World Heritage List9
UNESCO honors the hand-tended slopes of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, and the families who have farmed them for generations finally get the applause they deserve.
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2020
Prosecco Rosé Arrives10
The first bottles of Prosecco Rosé reach the world’s tables, made with a touch of Pinot Nero and a lot of pink.
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2022Bella Principessa Begins Quietly Pouring
Before the ceramic-painted bottles and the velvet displays, Bella Principessa was poured in small batches for a handful of venues and insiders.
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2024Prosecco Becomes the World’s Favorite Fizz11
660 million+
bottles of Prosecco in a single year, a record, and around 60 million of them rosé. The United States has become its biggest fan abroad.
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2025Bella Principessa Is Born
Our princess gets her name and her painted bottle, made with a fourth-generation family winery in the Veneto that knows those hills by heart.
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The Bella Principessa Social Club Opens Its Doors
Curated collaborations, modern rituals and long golden evenings. And they all lived sparkling ever after.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 14, §60 (Livia and the wine of Pucinum). Perseus Digital Library
- Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (London, 1617), on his 1593 travels near Trieste and the wine of Prosecco.
- Aureliano Acanti, Il Roccolo Ditirambo (Venice, 1754).
- “Carpenè Malvolti celebrates 150 years,” Wine Industry Advisor, 8 Feb 2018. Article
- Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, chapter on Carpenè, Cerletti and the Scuola Enologica di Conegliano (1876). PDF
- Veneto Region, Veneto Around Me: Adami, Valdobbiadene (Vigneto Giardino, 1920). Page
- Italia.it, Italian National Tourist Board: the Prosecco wine road of the Conegliano Valdobbiadene hills, founded 1966. Page
- Domain registration record for prosecco.com: created 26 November 1999 (WHOIS).
- UNESCO World Heritage List: Le Colline del Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene, ref. 1571, inscribed 2019. UNESCO
- “Prosecco DOC Rosé officially approved to begin exporting worldwide,” Wine Industry Advisor, 2 Nov 2020. Article
- “Prosecco DOC ends 2024 with record results,” Wine Industry Advisor, 27 Jan 2025 (660 million bottles; about 60 million rosé; the US the largest export market). Article
Images: 50 BCE, Grapevine (Vitis vinifera), workshop of the Master of Claude de France, Book of Flower Studies, ca. 1510–1515, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain), via the Public Domain Image Archive. 1593, Map of the City of Ferrara with the Six Rivers Flowing into the Gulf of Venice, from Piri Reis’s Kitab-ı Bahriye (sea atlas first compiled in the 1520s), The Walters Art Museum (public domain), via the Public Domain Image Archive. 1754, detail of Grand Bacchanal, etching, 1680, Rijksmuseum (public domain), via the Public Domain Image Archive. 1868, “Pressure of the air,” from Gaston Tissandier’s Scientific Amusements, 1883, California Digital Library (public domain), via the Public Domain Image Archive. 1876, Alchemical flasks, from Von der Universal Tinctur, 1677, Wellcome Collection (public domain), via the Public Domain Image Archive. Early 1900s, September, design by Walter Crane, verses by Beatrice Crane, from The Procession of the Months, ca. 1889, Harvard University (public domain), via the Public Domain Image Archive. 2019, Prosecco valley, photograph by Alberto Davide Lorenzi, 2020, cropped, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The story, in questions.
What is the history of Prosecco in Italy?
Prosecco’s story runs from a Roman empress and her Pucinum to a village near Trieste, a poet’s drinking song in 1754, the first sparkling experiments of the 1800s and the UNESCO hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene. Each chapter has its own date, so we happily celebrate them all.
The milestones and the old storiesIs Prosecco a place or a grape?
Both, in its time. Prosecco is a village near Trieste, and for centuries the grape grown around it shared the name. Today the grape is called Glera and Prosecco is the wine. One word, two jobs, and it does both cheerfully.
The village and the grapeWhat is the Martinotti method?
It’s how most Prosecco gets its bubbles. The wine has a second fermentation in a sealed pressure tank, and the carbon dioxide the yeast makes stays in the wine. You’ll also hear it called Charmat or the tank method: three names for one happy idea.
How the pressure tank works, for white and roséWhere are the Prosecco hills in Italy?
They’re in the Conegliano Valdobbiadene area of northeastern Italy: steep green ridges, vineyards, little villages and woods, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage landscape. It’s one of the prettiest corners of Prosecco country.
What UNESCO recognized, and planning a visitWho makes Bella Principessa?
A fourth‑generation family winery in the Veneto, in northeast Italy, makes Bella Principessa for us from Glera grapes. The brand belongs to Best Drinks Inc., founded by Michael Goldstein. The winery makes the wine, and we look after everything else.
The winery, the name and how it’s made
