Valdobbiadene historical timeline

Origins

The area was settled in Roman times and the name is usually derived from a Latin estate name; for most of its history this was an unremarkable valley community of subsistence farming, chestnuts and silk.

Turning points

Under Venice from the early fifteenth century, the hillsides were gradually terraced for vines -- slow, incremental work by smallholders rather than any single project, which is why the terraces vary so much from slope to slope.

Influential people

The nineteenth-century growers who began identifying individual slopes laid the groundwork for the modern rive system. The Scuola Enologica at Conegliano, from 1876, supplied the technical method.

Cultural evolution

The Piave front ran just below here in 1917-18, and the war emptied and damaged the valley badly. Recovery was slow, and emigration heavy well into the twentieth century.

Present-day significance

DOC status arrived in 1969 and DOCG in 2009. The 2019 UNESCO inscription recognised the terraced landscape, and brought with it both a tourism boom and a sharper argument about how much vineyard these hills should carry.