A plague on prosecco!

Once a smart alternative to champagne, now it’s massproduced, tooth rotting swill, brawled over in cut-price supermarkets. JAN MOIR says...

Riots in the streets. Civilisation teetering on the drink brink. A dozen tattooed women with three teeth between them brawling in the aisles over dwindling stocks. these apocalyptic scenarios, which took place in the UK over the weekend, were not caused by plague, pestilence or flood — but, yes, by a shortage of sparkling wine.

Hold my glass, nation, and ask yourself this. What is prosecco doing to people?

When supermarket chain Lidl sportingly offered a special promotion of six bottles of its own-brand Allini prosecco for £20, they could have no idea of the trouble that was to follow.

the offer led to 6am queues forming outside Lidl stores up and down the country. Unfortunately, the supermarket chain soon had to apologise to disappointed customers after underestimating the demand.

in many shops, the reduced £3.33-a-bottle wine sold out in minutes, leaving the prosecco bargain-hunters furious and in need of a steadying drink ... or perhaps a howl at the moon.

Fights broke out at a store in Huddersfield. in Bristol, ‘people were going mad’, while there was ‘shouting and jostling’ in Birmingham. in Glasgow — the prosecco capital of the UK, according to rival chain Aldi — customers reported that they had ‘never seen the store this busy’.

spotting the three quid bottles of fizz, one local wine connoisseur noted her approval on Facebook: ‘Might taste like battery acid, but at least it isn’t Lambrini.’

Well, quite. For the great Bank Holiday Prosecco outrage has taught us three important things. First, only the foolhardy would come between a thirsty girl and her glass of discount bubbles.

second, the British are in the absolute grip of a roaring prosecco obsession, which shows no sign of diminishing despite dire warnings from dentists about the tooth-rotting, enamel-eroding properties of the acidic, sugary drink.

Prosecco is particularly popular with women, with noted over-enthusiastic consumption from the kind of mothers who rightly chide their children about cans of pop, without realising that their own fizzy drink of choice has an even higher sugar content.

this has led to a condition dentists have identified as a ‘prosecco smile’. imagine a few toppled tombstones in a sparse and sooty graveyard, and you get the terrible picture. Nevertheless, sales of prosecco have risen by 72 per cent since 2012, making the UK the fastest-growing market for italian sparkling wines.

Last year we knocked back 40 million litres of the stuff, prompting Boris Johnson to invoke the beverage in his Brexit negotiations. He argued that italy could not impose trade restrictions because it would be loath to ‘sell less prosecco’.

third, in the weekend stampede we learned what kind of prosecco British women really enjoy. Do they prefer peach or apricot top notes, a long, crisp finish, a creamy head or a hit of sunny Mediterranean hillside in the aftertaste?

No, DArLiNG. What they really like is cheap. What they really want is the budget flavour of industrially produced, indiscriminate sugary glug, filtered through a sherbetscented pop sock.

so would i care for a lovely glass of sparkling prosecco? No, i would certainly not. in fact, i’d rather have a foaming beaker of saccharine-enriched tap water, flavoured with a syrup of boiled sweets selected from a Woolworths pick’n’mix counter circa 1975 — because, more often than not, that is what prosecco tastes like.

these days if i don’t quite hate prosecco, i hate what prosecco has become — the cheapest of cheap alternatives to champagne, industrially produced by winemakers who long ago sacrificed quality for quantity in the rush to meet ever-increasing demand.

it was once a fizzy, frothy, sexy upstart alternative to the painfully expensive treat of champagne. it made us feel rather smug for being able to cradle a flute of sparkles instead of a wine glass — and still not pay the earth.

But now poor old prosecco is notorious as the ladette’s drink of choice; the first liquid port of call for hen parties, for Magaluf-style bacchanals, for weekend boozing and cruising.

You’ll find it tucked into buckets of melting ice at hotel breakfast buffets, too, where guests who can’t help showing their lack of class cackle over the flutes as they glug it back with their toast and eggs at 9am.

if Bridget Jones were around today, she would be drinking copious amounts of prosecco, not her beloved chardonnay. that’s not to say there are no lovely bottles of quality prosecco available — there are — but they are increasingly like sunken treasures, lost in the tidal wave of grisly prosecco that fuels parties, weddings and receptions across the land.

Who hasn’t felt that sinking moment of alcohol anti-climax when someone suggests a glass of champagne (yes, please!), only to put a flute of El spew Mante into your trembling hand?

one gulp and it swirls around your teeth like Cif shower Mousse, with a Cillit Bang topnote. You can practically feel your teeth dissolving like aspirins.

After two gulps i am reminded of the scene in skyfall, where the Bond villain removes his prosthetic dentures to show Judi Dench what a hydrogen cyanide cocktail has done to his teeth.

‘Look upon your work, mother,’ he screams, through the rotting grotto of his dental stumps.

A prosecco top-up, madam? Don’t mind if i don’t.

Yet increasingly i am a lone dissenter, a prosecco party-pooper. For prosecco is the drink that is taking over the country, becoming a social and cultural phenomenon — although not in a good way.

Nigella Lawson says she loves the spirit-lifting properties of a glass of prosecco — she calls it her

prozacco — and theresa May is reported to have spent the summer entertaining tory MPs with prosecco parties.

Yet despite their high-profile patronage, prosecco is going to have to work hard to shake off its new reputation as the ultimate cheap indulgence; the preferred tipple of the little lady who once would have opted for Malibu or Baileys but now thinks she has gone upmarket with her glass of bubbles and her tube of Pringles, even if she has to fight on a supermarket floor to enjoy them.

sadly, prosecco has become the Babycham for a new generation of she-boozers, women who don’t seem to mind being patronised by a marketing campaign that suggests all they do is sit around waiting for prosecco o’clock.

AND that’s what really bothers me. it is not just the dwindling quality of prosecco, although that is bad enough. it is all the girlish guff that companies sell in the hope of cashing in on the trend.

tesco sells sticks of prosecco-flavoured rock to take on hen nights. John Lewis sells prosecco-scented candles, plus prosecco-flavoured gummies and bonbons.

Lakeland has had great success with a raspberry flavoured powder which drinkers add to their prosecco to make it shimmer — perhaps it improves the taste, too?

You can buy a doormat that bears the legend ‘Come in if You Have Prosecco’ and a tea towel that reads ‘one Prosecco, two Prosecco, three Prosecco, Floor’.

it’s terrible, it’s awful and it doesn’t even taste nice. Frankly, i can’t wait for the prosecco bubble to burst.