Monday, August 20, 2007

Prosecco: Italian Hot Weather Drink

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Prosecco's is a mildly fizzy sparkling wine, a level cheaper below Asti Spumante, a surrogate Champagne.

 

 

Prosecco: What Italians Drink in Hot Weather

 

Daily Bulletin.com

By Joe Coulombe

Retired Founder of Trader Joe's

August 12, 2007

 

Prosecco is a mildly fizzy sparkling wine. It was rarely seen 20 years ago, but it's becoming more visible these days. It's probably best right now during the dog days of August.

Prosecco is mostly made from the white prosecco grape grown in a chilly part of Northeast Italy. Sparkling wines like Champagne originated in the coldest vineyards of Europe during the Little Ice Age, around 1700. Wine usually was made in the autumn, but the fermentation of sugar into alcohol would get "stuck" because the cellars were too cold.

The following spring, warmth would wake up the yeast and give a second fermentation, which left the wine with a spritz.

Today, most prosecco is made not in bottles but in big vats, which are called cuves closes in the charmat process. Think of Andre Champagne. It comes in two levels of sparkling: frizzante which is mildly sparkling, and spumante which is closer to Champagne in its carbonation. If it's labeled metodo classico it was fermented in a bottle, but that's rare.

Looking at labels: The most authoritative, expensive appellation is the tongue-twisting valdobbliadene prosecco superiore. It comes from the prosecco -growing vineyards northeast of Venice. The weather up there, near the Dolomite Mountains, is very cool.

Like Champagne, prosecco comes in different levels of sweetness, like brut, extra dry, etc. Mostly it is mildly sweet. In 2005, 44 million bottles were made. It was Italy's best selling sparkling wine, if I can believe a recent press release, which means prosecco beat out Asti spumante, which I doubt.

One of the prosecco's advantages is that it's relatively cheap. That's why you may find it served at wedding receptions this summer as a surrogate Champagne. With the average cost of a wedding these days at $47,000, fathers need all the help they can get.

Asti spumante;now, it's simply Asti

I showed my age (77) above in referring to Asti spumante. In 1993 it got "upgraded" to simply Asti. Asti is also the name of a village in northwestern Italy, south of Torino. A huge amount of acreage has been devoted to growing the moscato bianco grape that goes into the sparkling wine.

I was surprised that prosecco makers claim to have outsold Asti because Asti has been far and away Italy's No. 1 wine, beating out soave (a non-sparkling wine.). Production runs around 80 million bottles a year.

One nice thing is that Asti is relatively low alcohol, around 9.5 percent (Champagne is 12 percent). Its sweetness, however, has always bothered me.

And the flavor of the moscato gets in the way of most foods except, possibly, blanc mange. (Remember the Monty Python skit about blanc mange? Or is that another reflection of my age?)

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