Excellent article on the identity crisis in the Prosecco world (and perhaps the most detailed take on the zona I have ever seen in English):
Thanks for posting this, Roberto.
I’ll check a couple out.
It’s a perennial issue. The same thing happened with balsamic vinegar. Most is white wine vinegar with caramel and a teeny bit of aged vinegar. That’s legally called “Balsamic Vinegar of Modena” and is produced in a day or two, and by the tanker load. The stuff – a thick condiment syrup – that is made from reduced grape must and aged for a minimum of 12 years is “Traditional Balsamic Vinegar of Modena.” There has been a running battle not to erode the trademark of the real stuff.
Yes, but it’s more complicated by the recent sell out of the Dept of Agriculture to the industrial producers on the flats. After decades of informed retailers and sommeliers painstakingly training folks to look for the DOC on the good stuff from the hillside vineyards and even tasting them side by side for proof, they made a “compromise” where the industrial guys took a nominal hit in max volume per hectare in exchange for being granted DOC status and then promoting the existing DOC producers to DOCG status.
Net result: consumer confusion and now folks like Mionetto and Bolla are using their ad budgets to flog inferior stuff with DOC labels.
Chiant and Chianti Classico come to mind, too.
Thanks for posting. Good article - long, but good. I need to pay more attention the next time I buy.
The difference is stark: akin to good micros vs industrial beer. When people tell you they don’t like Prosecco, they’ve probably never had a real one.
Nice to see someone give them the unapologetic high press/praise they deserve. Having had (and sold) several of those mentioned, they far exceed most people’s preconception of what Prosecco can achieve, and once you put them in the right people’s mouths they start pulling them out for all sorts of occasions. My wife gets bad headaches from all carbonated wines, but she makes exceptions for some Prosecco…
thanks for info sharing. I like them since they pair food well
Silvia Franco of Nino Franco weighs in:
Never had anyone tell me that.
I here that all the time and, 90% of the time, it turns out they have only had $8 crap from the flatlands they bought at BevMo or Trader Joe’s.
For me, great Prosecco is, for a variety of reasons, one of the world’s most wonderful wines. It also used to be one of the wine world’s best kept secrets. Not so any more. Prices have begun to creep up over the last five or so years and there are more and more producers who price their top-end/single-vineyard wines to rival lower-end and sometimes even mid-range Franciacorta, which used to be unimaginable.
Good article and clears up one thing that I had been wondering about. I didn’t know they had adopted a different name for the grape. I was at a local retail tasting recently. The woman pouring offered a Prosecco and went on to describe it, which included her naming the grape. I didn’t recognize it. I wanted to correct her and tell her that Prosecco is the name of the grape… I was 100% sure right up to the second she called it by a different name. I can’t remember what she actually called it, but she must have said Glera… at least I hope she did…
I liked the article, although I notice that the author appeared to be making the common mistake of judging RS in Prosecco by a Champagne standard. Although very high quality Brut wines are now being made, the classic top-quality Prosecco was almost always Extra Dry, not Brut. This is one of the many differences between Champagne and good Prosecco.
‘Rarely do I admire a producer’s Extra Dry Prosecco as much as the Brut offering, but at Sorelle Bronca, I could not find any quality difference between the two…’
In my experience the Extra Dry is almost always more expressive and better than the Brut.
+1000000000!
We really don’t offer any Brut as they are often mean and surly.
When I first went looking for a Prosecco to import, I asked the man helping me (who happened to be the head of the Consorzio trade group for quality Prosecco) to stick to proper Brut wines, with none of that nasty Extra Dry. He gave me an amused look and said ‘why don’t we taste some of each,’ after we did so I realized my mistake. For one thing the XD is always more aromatic than the Brut from the same base wine, which I don’t understand.
I don’t really have any clear-cut preferences that might be expressed in terms of Brut vs Extra Dry. To me it really depends on the winemaker and on the specific wine. BTW, I feel the same way about what might be defined as an increasing emphasis on zero dosage in Champagne over the last 10-15 years, which, as I have noticed, is often claimed to be driven by a desire for greater purity and terroir expression. It works for some wines, and for some others - not so much. I think the same is probably true of Prosecco.
Edit: it also depends a lot on whether I’m just using the Prosecco as an aperitif or, if not, what I’m eating with it. Frozza’s Colbertaldo Brut, a beautifully precise, articulate and gracefully energetic wine, worked fabulously with some maki yesterday: very difficult to imagine a better match. I don’t think the Col dell’Orso Extra Dry (otherwise one of the best Extra Dry Prosecco that money can buy, if you ask me) would have worked as well.
Speaking of which, given your comments above, Oliver, my curiosity was piqued and I had to go and check which producer you import. Case in point: I find your producer’s Brut very balanced and definitely one of the better examples of the style (although you seem to be putting your money where your mouth is and are actually not importing it? 
). Complimenti - great selection, as usual.
When I lived in Northern Italy, the best Prosecco I ever had was a homemade version by a local Otolaryngologist. Aged in bottle a couple of years. It had the charm of a normal Prosecco, but the depth and complexity of aging on the lees.