(NYT) Italy Dispatch: A Battle of the Bubbles: War Comes to the Prosecco Hills

[AKR]

Italy Dispatch: A Battle of the Bubbles: War Comes to the Prosecco Hills
2021-10-01 15:54:54.687 GMT

By Jason Horowitz

(New York Times) -- VALDOBBIADENE, ITALY — Small pickup trucks carrying mounds
of green grapes wound through Prosecco Road. Workers harvesting in the
terraced vineyards squinted in the sun. Tipsy tourists stopped in for
tastings. Couples clinked glasses in the town’s quaint Prosecco bars.

But behind the effervescent front, producers of Italy’s wildly popular
sparkling white wine in the northeastern Veneto region were on war footing.

“I feel like I’m going to battle,” said Elvira Maria Bortolomiol as she
pantomimed carrying a rifle in an airy tasting room next to her vineyards. An
owner of the Bortolomiol winery and new president of a consortium of
producers, Ms. Bortolomiol said a surprise attack had “disoriented us.”

War and internal strife have come to Prosecco country. The European Union, in
a major buzz kill for a Spritz-fueled multibillion euro industry, last month
agreed to consider a longstanding application by Croatia to recognize Prosek,
a method of making an obscure sweet — and still — dessert wine of the same
name.

Big Prosecco has fought off myriad other salvos — counterfeits like Meer-secco
and Cansecco, and the warnings of British dentists about sugary spumante
rotting the country’s teeth. But tiny Prosek, a legitimately old wine from an
E.U. member state, presented a unique threat.

A significant slice of the Italian economy is built on typically Italian
products with names, and sounds, protected from imitation. If the E.U. allowed
Prosek today, producers argue, could Farmesan be far behind?

And so Prosecco producers and local officials have joined Italy’s government
to crush Prosek. The argument is that recognition by Brussels would confuse
consumers and set a dangerous precedent.

“Recognizing Prosek could legitimize a ton of other products that are
imitations,” said Luca Giavi, the president of the Consortium to Protect
Prosecco.

As if demonstrating the yield of a D.E.A. drug bust, he put seized Romanian
“Pro-Secco,” a 10-pack of glitter “Prosecco Bath Bombs” and Prosecco Princess
Shower Gel on the table of his headquarters. “The important thing is to have
an enemy,” he said. “It unites us.”

But not everyone.

In a dark and vaulted cellar under a stone Prosecco museum on the
Valdobbiadene hillside, Enrico Bortolomiol — Ms. Bortolomiol’s first cousin —
argued that the conflict over the Croatian wine presented a rare chance to
advance a radical agenda: The time had come to ditch the name Prosecco.

The grandmaster of the Confraternity of Valdobbiadene — a hallowed society of
Prosecco makers from the wine’s traditional home on the Valdobbiadene and
Conegliano hills — Mr. Bortolomiol, 55, wore a heavy white fustian cloak,
black velvet cap and a gold medallion embossed with the brotherhood’s coat of
arms. Around him, frescoes depicted the society’s four founding fathers
knocking some chalices back with giddy medieval knights, a topless Bacchus and
women in slinky togas.

With his back to dusty bottles of the hill’s best spumante through the
decades, he sat with tented hands on an elevated seat and argued that the good
name of Prosecco had been irrevocably sullied by overproduction on the
mechanically harvested and viticulturally uninteresting provinces that
accounted for 500 million of the 600 million bottles on the market.

“We have nothing to do with that,” Mr. Bortolomiol said.

“We are trying to put the name Prosecco in the background,” Mr. Bortolomiol
added as a fellow knight in red robes nodded gravely.

Over the decades, Italy has given different protected geographical indications
for different bottles of Prosecco depending on where they are produced. The
traditional hills get a brown seal; nine new provinces where the wine is made
get a blue one. The old hills get an extra G — for Guaranteed origin. The new
ones don’t. But most consumers don’t know the difference; they just look for
the name Prosecco.

And Mr. Bortolomiol believes there is not much left in that name.

Its purity, he said, had been contaminated by Aperol and Campari and the
cloying Jolly Rancher-colored Spritzes that have conquered aperitive-hour the
world over. Prosecco’s rock bottom prices were also blasphemous to the spirit
of the confraternity’s founders, including his uncle and Ms. Bortolomiol’s
father.

One billboard outside town advertised a bottle of Prosecco for 2.79 euros if
purchased with a six-pack of canned tuna.

Mr. Bortolomiol believes Prosecco has become “a generic name” for any swill
with bubbles and was no longer worth defending — from Prosek or anyone else.

His fellow knight, Daniele Buso, hopes the latest dispute will lead Prosecco
producers to “an illumination.”

The only path to avoiding confusion and insultingly low prices was to break
away and rebrand, putting the good stuff in bottles marked with a V, which the
brotherhood happened to sell. Call it Conegliano Valdobbiadene Superior
Spumante, or some permutation thereof, as long as the wine was explicitly tied
to its traditional, and inimitable, territory.

For many Prosecco producers in the surrounding plains, the knights’ position
is both economically suicidal and treasonous in wartime.

Croatia, argued Giorgio Polegato, the president of Astoria wines, a giant in
the nearby plains, had shown “a lack of respect” in pushing its Prosek.

As mechanized harvest machines vacuumed his vineyards, he showed off enormous
steel tanks, decked out, as if ready for a night out, in bright lights and
stylized accessories. In the winery’s Fashion Victim Lounge, bottles labeled
“Glam,” “Diva” and “Funky” stood on the glossy walls. He embraced the Spritz
and attributed the wild success of Prosecco in part to its price point. He
also described it as “easier to drink,” and extremely popular with Americans,
Brits and the ladies.

“Women like it,” he said.

Increasingly, people come to drink Aperitivos, and pre-Aperitivo Aperitivos,
and pre pre-Aperitivo Aperitivos, in the Prosecco hills.

In 2019, after an enormous lobbying effort, UNESCO declared Valdobbiadene and
Conegliano a World Heritage Site.

“It changed everything,” said Marina Montedoro, a leader in that effort. She
now worries that recognizing Prosek might lead tourists to accidentally go to
Croatia. “It could happen,” she said.

For now, people know where to go. Two Slovakian women emerged from
Valdobbiadene’s vineyards and stopped next to a couple enjoying two morning
glasses of Prosecco.

“No husbands, no children, just Prosecco,” said Lucia Figurova, 33. “This
place is made for me.”

That is music to the ears of Valdobbiadene’s mayor, Luciano Fregonese, who —
while proud that a pope was born in the town about 700 years ago — is focused
on making his community a pilgrimage site for Prosecco enthusiasts. Outside
city hall — which sells wine stoppers in its tourist office — workers hammered
cobblestones into a pedestrian piazza being converted from a traffic circle to
make the town more inviting for an increasing number of visitors.

“The nightmare,” he said, “is that tourists drive through and see the hills
and leave, like this is Jurassic Park.”

At one Prosecco bar on the square, Agostino Piazza, 22, celebrated his college
graduation after completing his thesis, “Resilience of the Value Chain of
Conegliano and Valdobbiadene Prosecco.”

In the brotherhood’s cellar, Mr. Bortolomiol remained convinced that the true
resilience of the local sparkling wine was in its quality and disassociation
from a word that had lost all meaning.

Protecting the spirit, if not the name, of Prosecco was the mission of his
knights, who, he said, took a solemn pledge before a vine-shaped sword to
renounce water, which brought only woe, and to exalt the local bubbly. Each
new member then needed to chug half a bottle of the winner of the
confraternity’s annual blind taste test.

“And then,” Mr. Buso said, “they are made a Knight of Prosecco.”

“Valdobbiadene,” the grandmaster corrected him.

“Right,” Mr. Buso said. “Slip of the tongue.”