Learn about Conegliano

Conegliano sits on the last hills before the Veneto plain, where the pre-Alpine foothills drop away to flat farmland. That boundary is the whole point: the steep morainic slopes north of town hold the DOCG vineyards, while the plain to the south grows everything else.

A castle town on the frontier of the Treviso march, Conegliano passed to Venice in 1389 and spent four centuries as a quiet Venetian hill town. Its modern identity was made in the nineteenth century, when Italy's first oenology school opened here in 1876 and turned local winemaking into an exportable science.

Conegliano's culture is wine and painting, and the two are less separate than they sound: Cima put these hills into his altarpieces five centuries before they were a UNESCO landscape. The town is also, unusually, an educational centre -- the oenology school gives it a student population and a technical seriousness a place this size would not otherwise have.

The town is built up a hillside in brick and stucco, with continuous arcades carrying the upper floors of its main street. The more remarkable construction is agricultural: the ciglioni, grassy earth terraces cut by hand into slopes too steep for any machine, which are what UNESCO actually listed.

Conegliano has a humid subtropical climate moderated by its position against the Prealps -- warm summers, cold damp winters, and reliable rainfall spread through the year. That combination, plus the drainage of the steep slopes, is what suits the Glera grape.