Wine 101 Wednesday: Prosecco and the “Metodo Italiano”

We’ve been bouncing back and forth between Pinot and Prosecco for the last few days, thanks to a couple of quite wonderful tastings I attended in San Francisco last week. When we left off yesterday, I promised you more about the specialized methods of Prosecco production in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy.

First, I’d like to say thanks for all *your* inquiries about Prosecco, and since this is our first “First Wednesday,” when I answer *your* questions, I’ll field them here, as part of my wrapup. (Thanks, Jim in OR; Ben in SoCal; M.A. in NY! And “mille grazie” to the many members of the Consorzio Tutela Prosecco Conegliano Valdobbiadene, the Prosecco governing body, who personally provided me with detailed descriptions at the Vino in Villa tasting. Their excellent website,
www.prosecco.it filled in lots of extra details, as well as the quotes.)

Back to the Prosecco how-to. At harvest time, the members of the Consorzio carefully monitor grape maturity in the vineyards throughout the zone. When the time is right, the Consorzio holds a public meeting to give the many growers the go-ahead to start picking.

The grapes then move to the various wineries, where special crushers gently press them to extract only the “free-run juice from the heart of the berry.” (The remainder eventually gets distilled into Prosecco grappa.) Generally, a winery keeps different “lots” of grapes from different vineyards or areas separate, to preserve the unique character of each one.

This free-run juice rests for 12-14 hours in stainless-steel tanks to let the sediment settle out, and then is allowed to ferment, becoming Prosecco “base wine.” The winemaker tastes the various lots, then blends them “in precise proportions, so as to achieve a perfect balance of all the components.”

Now comes the “Metodo Italiano”: Italy’s version of the Charmat process, in which a sparkling wine’s secondary fermentation takes place in large, pressure-sealed vats. Also used in the Piemonte region to make the famed Asti Spumante, this method works better for Prosecco than the more time-consuming (and more expensive) Methode Champenoise, in which a wine ferments in individual bottles with lengthy yeast contact.

Why? Because Prosecco, and the Muscat-based Asti Spumante, are fruit-driven. Their charm is all about freshness and bright flavors, and the yeast-based characteristics of Champenoise sparklers just aren’t necessary. (Some producers, in fact, actually argue that these flavors would detract from their Prosecco.)

What’s more, since the Metodo Italiano is faster and less costly, the Prosecco can come to market sooner, with a price tag that suits it to celebrating every single day. And that’s a win-win in my book!

BTW: I also promised you more info about the term “DOC” (Denominazione di Origine Controllata). This refers to a set of quality-assurance rules for Italian wine production, in force throughout the country. Established by presidential decree in 1963, DOC is comparable to the French AOC, which was instituted in the 1950s for the same purpose.

The DOC concept is so important that I’ll bring it back soon for a Wine 101 Wednesday of its own. Meanwhile, we’ll taste some Pinots tomorrow. Until then,

Cheers,
Rosina

PS—Apologies for this late posting. As you can see, it’s now Thursday the 5th. I took a looong walk on the beach yesterday morning, and between that and the 100-degree afternoon, I was so wiped in the evening that I actually fell asleep at my laptop…
gilded fork, wine, wine writing, Welcome to Wine Country, Rosina Tinari Wilson

Winemeisters Weekend: Daniele D’Anna of Cantine Umberto Bortolotti

Yesterday I brought you to an amazing tasting of Prosecco, the food-friendly sparkling wine of the Veneto in northeastern Italy. The event featured members of the Consorzio Tutela del Vino Prosecco DOC di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene. Since the 1960s, this consortium of producers has established, and now maintains and enhances, the high standards of quality for their wine. www.prosecco.it

I had the great pleasure of meeting quite a few vintners, to taste at least two or three different Prosecco bottlings at each table, and to trot out my rusty Italian. In the back of the room, framed against a backdrop of San Francisco Bay and the distant Carneros wine-growing district that spans the southern edge of both Napa and Sonoma, stood the tall, charismatic Daniele D’Anna. Earlier, during my first tasting at the Adami winery table, www.adamispumanti.it the well-connected Enrico Valleferro had singled out “mi amico Daniele” and his wines as an absolute “must.”

Daniele is the grandson (on his mother’s side, hence the different surnames), of Umberto Bortolotti, who founded his eponymous winery www.bortolotti.com in Valdobbiadene in 1947. Daniele is as warm, charming, smart and fun as he is movie-star handsome. (See pic, and yesterday’s too.) And the guy makes some fine, fine vino to boot.

When I arrived at his table, Daniele was pouring his Brut—the first of several Prosecco bottlings from the winery’s “UB” line—for a small group of tasters. I quickly joined in. I loved the wine’s crisp tang and clean dry finish, with nice full fruit. We kicked around some recipe ideas, most of which involved some sort of seafood. (I immediately pictured a mound of oysters, a shucking knife, a lemon and a slew of napkins.)

His second wine, the Extra Dry, has a bit more sweetness in the dosage (pronounced doh-SAAZH, this is a French term for the sugar added to sparkling wine just before bottling; Brut generally has less than Extra Dry). This gives it a softer, rounder overall impression, and suits it to foods with sweetness, salt and/or spice. Our conversation twisted and turned from prosciutto with melon to Thai food and sushi (see yesterday’s post), with lots of tasty stops along the way.

Last, and anything but least, Daniele poured us a taste of the ultra-luxe Cartizze (named for a tiny town in the nearby hills, with an even cooler microclimate than the rest of the region). Cartizze has earned the VSQPRD (Vini Spumanti di Qualita’ Prodotti in Regioni Determinate) designation. Refined, subtle, elegant: bring on the salmon and caviar. (And instead of springing for the sturgeon stuff, I’ll pick up some tobiko (flying-fish roe) at the Asian market for this beauty.

Mille grazie, Daniele D’Anna, for the delicious pours, the lively conversation, and all your great ideas on pairing Prosecco with a world of food. Thanks also for the great “to go” boxful of bubbles—my friends, family and I will be enjoying your wines, and toasting you and your Consorzio colleagues, for quite a while. (And happy 60th anniversary to the Bortolotti winery!)

Ciao for now, e salute—
Cheers,
Rosina
gilded fork, wine, wine writing, Welcome to Wine Country, Rosina Tinari Wilson

FoodPairing Friday: Prosecco ROCKS! (in both senses..)

Well, I know I promised you some tasting notes, and some food-pairing ideas, for the “Best Red” wines from last week’s San Francisco International Wine Competition.

Sometimes the best-laid plans… well, you know. OK with you if we put that on the back burner for a (very short) while? ‘Cause I went to a stop-the-presses Prosecco tasting yesterday, and the Italian winemakers/winery owners and I talked food-and-wine-pairing the whole time. Then they filled the ‘vertible with lotsa bottles, and…

In case you’re worrying, I aced the sobriety test. The winemakers/winery owners (let’s just call them “vintners”) and I decided that if you can say “Il Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene” without a hitch, you’re OK to drive home. (BTW, it’s “eel proh-SEHC-coh dee coh-neh-LYAh-noh eh vahl-doh-BYAH-deh-neh.”) www.prosecco.it

If I hadn’t already been in love with Prosecco, I would have fallen head over heels at this tasting. First of all, it was held in the Crown Room, high atop the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, with postcards-on-steroids views out the many windows. (Here’s one of Coit Tower.) You could do a water tasting here and feel intoxicated.

At any rate, the vintners and I agreed that neither the view nor the Prosecco *needed* any improvement, but each of them really did (at least seem to) enhance the other, the way a wine can enhance an already-delicious food, and vice-versa.

Which leads me to… today’s FoodPairing Friday musings. As I spoke with the vintners about their favorite food pairings with their own bottlings, I reminisced about the first time I ever tasted Prosecco, in the early ‘90s, on a very romantic evening in Venice. The wine was barely a blip on the American-export-market radar at that point, and it took several years for me to be able to find any decent examples of Prosecco here at home.

Today there are dozens of them, in beautiful, classy packages, and at amazingly reasonable prices. Between Italian Prosecco and Spanish cava, which I also love, I have my value-priced-bubbly needs covered. Virtually all of them cost less than $20.00 a bottle, and I often find excellent ones for $10 or less.

On that night in Venice, at a friend’s “piccolo palazzo” (tiny palace), we were welcomed with some nuggets of local cheese and some tangy cured olives to go with the never-empty flutes of Prosecco. Great start. Prosecco is fruity enough to handle salt (the “peanut butter and jelly effect”!), and its crisp acids plus lively bubbles cut right through fat. We stayed with Prosecco through a lovely main dish of pasta with asparagus and turkey breast, lightly seasoned with olive oil and fresh local herbs. Both the wine and the pasta dish were at the same level of intensity: neither overpowered the other, and each one let the other’s flavors show through.

Yesterday in San Francisco, the Italian vintners regaled me with the culinary specialties of the Veneto region where Prosecco is produced, including seafood from the Adriatic coast, light pastas, creamy risotto, salumi (cured meats), vegetables such as zucchini and eggplant, and local fruits and cheeses. My palate memory, meanwhile, had hopped a flight right back to Italy.

Then one of the vintners, Daniele D'Anna of Cantine Umberto Bortolotti, www.bortolotti.com mentioned Thai food. And sushi. And we started to riff on things like dim sum, Vietnamese spring rolls, and East/West fusion food. At home, I generally drink bubbles (or beer) with that category of salty/sweet/tangy/spicy ethnic specialties, so we were definitely on the same page. What my new friend didn’t realize was that I had already planned to stop for take-out Thai on my way home. And when he generously gave me a six-pack of his Prosecco, that sealed the deal for me. (That's tall Daniele in the pic, squatting down to bottle level, with a quaffable quartet of Bortolotti Prosecco. More on Daniele tomorrow!)

So as not to develop chronic blogorrhea, I’m going to sign off in a moment, and then pick up next Friday with my Prosecco-with-Thai-food dinner. (BTW, since there was a sushi place around the corner from the Thai restaurant, and they had some great stuff on their “specials” list…) For now, I’ll finish up by telling you how I chilled down my Prosecco when I got home, starved and thirsty.

Putting a bottle in the freezer helps, but it still takes about 15 minutes. And I didn’t have any of those little plastic ice-ball-thingies at the ready. (They got moved out to make room for food. Priorities, you know.)

What I *did* have in the freezer was some grapes. Table grapes, frozen solid. So I improvised, filled my glass with the impromptu little edible “rocks,” and poured in the Prosecco. The icy grapes chilled down the vino before you could say “Prosecco Rocks!” (And later, after they thawed, the wine-soaked grapes made a dandy dessert.)

May your weekend rock too. Lots more about Prosecco In my next few posts. Meanwhile, you can learn more in yesterday's Culinary Roundtable #15 podcast on Prosecco.

Cheers (Salute)—
Rosina
gilded fork, wine, wine writing, Welcome to Wine Country, Rosina Tinari Wilson