The cloudy Prosecco your grandparents would recognise and most wine lists have forgotten — no dosage, no disgorgement, and a layer of sediment at the bottom of the bottle that’s the whole point, not a flaw.
“Col fondo” is Veneto dialect for “with the bottom” — the bottom in question being the layer of spent yeast, or lees, left sitting in the bottle. The wine is bottled with it still inside, unfiltered and undisgorged, so it comes out cloudy rather than bright and clear. Outside Italy the same method usually goes by its French name, sur lie — “on the lees” — so don’t be thrown if a wine list uses that instead.
Almost all Prosecco today ferments a second time in a big pressurised steel tank — the Charmat method — before being filtered clean and bottled. Col fondo skips the tank entirely: the second fermentation happens in the bottle itself, on its own sediment, with no disgorgement and usually no added sugar. The result is gently sparkling rather than fully fizzy, drier, and noticeably more savoury.
This isn’t a new technique dressed up as tradition — it’s more or less how most of the Veneto made Prosecco before the Charmat tank method took over the region in the mid-20th century. A handful of growers never stopped; the natural wine world spent the last two decades bringing everyone else back to it.
Nobody did more to keep col fondo alive than Loris Follador at Casa Coste Piane, farming the same steep Valdobbiadene slopes his family always has and bottling Prosecco the old way while the rest of the region moved to steel tanks. His bottles — and his refusal to filter them clean for the sake of looking tidy on a shelf — are the reference point most producers making col fondo today still measure themselves against.
Closer to home, our own Col del Lupo makes theirs the same way: L’Aldo, named for the grandfather who took over the family’s Valdobbiadene hillside in 1942, made come una volta — the way it used to be done, sediment and all.