Dave Erickson wrote:Sam Platt wrote:Oliver McCrum wrote:I love good Prosecco but I have to say there's an awful lot of the other kind out there...
I have to be honest in saying that I am not very good at differentiating between good and bad Prosecco. The $10 stuff and the $25 stuff tastes equally refreshing to me. We do make Kir with it regularly, so that masks the taste some, but I have no brand loyalty when it comes to Prosecco.
Actually, you're pretty astute. Prosecco quality has been uniformly good in recent years. And really, the stuff is priced in a fairly narrow band. I've never seen one priced over $20. I'm sure someone will correct me on this shortly....
I think that bubbles tend to disguise bad or mediocre wine, but if you had a selection of good and bad Proseccos next to each other, you'd see a very clear difference. Very few producers grow their own fruit, for one thing*; for another, most of the less expensive wines are the equivalent of IGT, not the DOC of Valdobbiadene/Conegliano, with lower standards (for one thing, they're not required to be 100% Prosecco). This is perhaps due to the weak dollar making it hard to hit certain price points.
Freshness is very important, too. Prosecco is like Fino sherry, it needs to be drunk as freshly bottled as possible. It won't be vintage-dated, but you may be able to make sense of the lot number...
One small Prosecco point: after tasting many different Proseccos from many different producers in both Brut and Extra Dry I have been forced to drop my 'Champagne prejudice' and accept that Extra Dry works better than Brut, for this variety. All the best examples (such as wines from Cartizze, for example) are at least Extra Dry, if not higher dosage, and the Brut is sold almost entirely in the export markets.
*All of Sorelle Bronca's wines are estate-bottled. I import Sorelle Bronca, so I'm not objective here.