If Italian sparkling wine is having a decent year while everything else struggles, there’s an obvious explanation. Prosecco. It’s always Prosecco, the bottle that conquered brunch, colonized the aperitivo hour. The one that convinced half the world that adding orange liquid to bubbles counts as a personality. Except Prosecco is…
I’ve seen bottles described as non-alcoholic Prosecco. Alcohol-free Prosecco. Zero-alcohol Prosecco. Prosecco alternatives. Prosecco-style sparkling wine. At some point I started wondering whether Prosecco itself had been informed about any of this. Because Italy has rules. Lots of rules. You cannot grow some Glera grapes wherever you fancy, put bubbles…
I bought a bottle of alcohol-free Moscato a while back. Fifteen euros. It got me asking questions I didn’t expect to spend this much time answering. Is this wine, or an expensive impersonation of it? How do you even get alcohol out of something once it’s already mixed in? Why…
Here’s what bothered me. Alcohol isn’t floating politely at the top of a bottle of wine, waiting to be poured away. You can’t strain it out. You can’t fish it out. There is unfortunately no tiny winery employee standing over the tank with tweezers, removing ethanol molecules one by one….
I understand the suspicion. Non-alcoholic wine comes from grapes. Grape juice comes from grapes. Neither one needs to contain enough alcohol to make a dinner conversation more interesting. And some non-alcoholic wines taste noticeably sweeter than the real thing. So when my fifteen-euro bottle of alcohol-free Moscato lands on the…
Someone always says the same thing about non-alcoholic wine. You honestly can’t tell the difference. I want to tell the difference immediately whenever I hear that. You took a finished wine. You pulled out one of the compounds responsible for its body, its aroma, its whole weight in the mouth….
Right now, across most of Italy, vendemmia is happening. That’s the word for the grape harvest, and if you live here, you feel it before you see it. Tractors moving slower through country roads because they’re loaded down. Restaurant menus quietly swapping in something new. A kind of low hum…
On July 30th, in the villages of Gussago and Montorfano, pickers walked into the vineyards of Franciacorta and started the earliest harvest this region has ever recorded. Not earliest in a decade. Earliest, full stop, since anyone started keeping track. Weeks of temperatures sitting around 37 to 38 degrees Celsius…
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