BUBBLING OVER
Sparkling wines are hot
Sparkling wines are a hot category. Sales of still wines have remained pretty steady over the last few years, but continue to grow for sparkling ones. That’s true for everything from Champagne to Spain’s Cava, but Prosecco is leading the way. Over the last three years, SAQ sales of this sparkling wine from the Veneto region in northeast Italy have almost doubled.
In 2015, the Prosecco region was expected to produce more than 400 million bottles of bubbly. Within that tidal wave, about 20 per cent is what is referred to Prosecco Superiore.
I recently spent three days touring Conegliano- Valdobbiadene, the historical growing zone for Prosecco, along with a smaller region named Asolo. In 2009, both regions were given DOCG ( Designation of Origin Controlled and Guaranteed) status, which is Italian wine’s top appellation status. Only wines made from grapes grown in these two areas have the right to call themselves Prosecco Superiore.
Before I delve into the differences, let’s consider the two factors Prosecco and Prosecco Superiore have in common: the grape and the way the wine is made. While historically in the region there were five grapes, today’s Prosecco is about a single grape variety called glera.
Glera is an interesting grape, and understanding it is to understand why Prosecco has become known as the “easy drinking sparkling wine.” Glera is different from other grapes used in making sparkling wine, like chardonnay, chenin blanc or pinot noir, in that its chief attributes are its aromatics and delicate fruitiness.
Open any bottle of Prosecco, and you should be able to find notes of delicate flowers like acacia or lily of the valley, alongside fruit notes of green apple, pear, lemon and peach. Open a bottle of Champagne or Cava, and you would normally find alongside the fruit notes, hints of nuts and a pastrytype brioche note. That’s because the wines used in making Champagne and Cava are often aged on their lees, or dead- yeast cells.
But the glera grape is rarely aged — it is low in polyphenols, chemical compounds found in grapes that are responsible for such things as texture, taste and ageability of a wine. So while less aromatically complex than other sparkling wines, Prosecco makes up for it with a certain primary freshness.
Prosecco is not ideally suited to the same method of production as Champagne and other sparkling wines, where the secondary fermentation — what creates the bubbles — is achieved in- bottle.
Instead, Prosecco relies on the Charmat method. At the turn of the 20th century, Prosecco was nothing like it is today. The grapes were harvested in October, partially fermented and put in bottle before the fermentation was complete. As winter and cooler temperatures arrived, the wine would stop fermenting. When spring arrived and the cellars warmed up, the wine would start to ferment again in- bottle, trapping the carbon dioxide. When finished, the result was a very dry, and somewhat yeasty sparkling wine.
In the 1920s, Antonio Carpenè of Carpenè Malvolti winery used a newly developed process called Charmat, whereby dry white wines are put into large pressurized tanks and sugar and yeast are added, allowing for a secondary fermentation. The idea was to showcase the fruit and floral aspects of the glera grape.
Adding sugar allowed wineries to produce a Prosecco with the desired sweetness. And at first, most of the Proseccos were decidedly sweet, and the modern version of Prosecco was born.
But similar to the shift in Champagne in the 19th century, there has been a movement over the last 30 years toward making drier wines. When looking at a bottle of Prosecco, you will see either Brut, Dry or Extra Dry. But they don’t necessarily mean what you would think.
Because the wines had been so sweet, when wineries started to cut back on sugar, the wines were labelled Dry. The next time they reduced the sugar and created a new category, the wines were labelled Extra Dry. Having run out of qualifiers for dry, when they reduced sugar even more, the wines were called Brut. So the sweetest wines are labelled Dry.
During my recent visit, I tasted a number of wines that were under 5g of sugar, and they were my favourites by far. Appellation rules don’t recognize Extra Brut, as a type of Prosecco, however. So the wines I believed were the most Superiore, must be labelled Brut or they can’t use the name Prosecco Superiore.
THEFUTURE OF PROSECCO SUPERIORE DOCG
Which brings us to the main difference between Prosecco and Prosecco Superiore: the land where the grapes are grown. Prosecco DOCG is made from grapes grown on flat lands over a massive territory that covers nine provinces between the Veneto and Friuli.
Conegliano- Valdobbiadene and Asolo, the home of Prosecco Superiore, include incredibly steep hillsides with much more complex soils.
I find Prosecco Superiore much more aromatic and it often shows a decidedly mineral aspect — as long as it is made with as little residual sugar as possible.
While not discounting the commercial success Prosecco has enjoyed over the last decade, many wineries told me that they need to emphasize how Prosecco Superiore is different from regular Prosecco.
A good first step would be to allow wineries to use Extra Brut and “No dosage” — whereby no residual sugar is left in the wine — on the labels. Many of us sparkling fanatics want sparkling wines as dry as possible. Sugar is the great equalizer and, from what I tasted, when the wines were either Extra Dry or Dry, I could see very little difference between Prosecco Superiore and regular Prosecco.
When you want to make a wine with no, or very little, sweetness, the winemaker must use the best grapes available. It is in these wines that I saw how interesting was the terroir of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene. These wines truly are Superiore.