Prosecco: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

In the last week the bigger wine news in Italy is the name of a wine, and this is Prosek, a Croatian wine, versus Prosecco, ‘THE’ italian wine.

The Good

Well, the name’s affair about Prosecco is a long one; until 2009 Prosecco was both the name of the grape and the wine, but in this way anyone could produce its own ‘Prosecco’, like anyone can produce Sangiovese or Chardonnay. But you cannot produce a wine named Chianti or Bordeaux, of course: these are local and regional names, so you can produce your wine from Sangiovese, Merlot or Chardonnay and give it a different name than Chianti or Bordeaux. Logical.

Veneto’s winegrowers produce over 620 million bottles (51 million cases), and 370 million bottles are exported all over the world. It means 2B€, 16% of all wine export. Not bad, right?

To avoid that other places and Countries could use the name Prosecco producing a wine from Prosecco grape, Italy claimed that it exists a town named Prosecco in Italy, in the Friuli Venezia-Giulia region. The Prosecco is a wine from Veneto, of course, but these fact (Prosecco is the name of an Italian town) avoided that other winegrowers could produce a Prosecco wine. And it changed the name of the grape to Glera, going back to the old one. It is produced with the Martinotti-Charmat technique, a second…