Have you ever felt you were out of step with the majority of the population? Call me a misanthrope, a snob or a fogey, but I feel that way with increasing regularity. The older I get the more I'm baffled by the popularity of snooker, karaoke, pilates, Jonathan Ross, boy bands and flavoured lattes. Grrrrrrrrrrrr...
Until very recently, I'd have put Prosecco in the same camp. I first took against this unexceptional sparkling wine on a visit to Harry's Bar in Venice, home of the Bellini. If your idea of drinking heaven is to be surrounded by fat American tourists and paying over the odds for a cocktail made out of peaches and over-cropped Prosecco, Harry's will be your kind of place. It certainly isn't mine.
As long as Prosecco remained largely a local Venetian tipple, I ignored it. But here in the UK it has been growing in popularity as a cheap alternative to Champagne. One PR company described it recently as 'a worldwide symbol of the aspirational Italian lifestyle', as if Prosecco were a Ferrari or a pair of Versace sunglasses. I'd rather drink Asti Spumante or dry Lambrusco, and that's saying a good deal.
I'm passing this on to give you an idea of my state of mind as I rocked up at the first ever UK tasting of Prosecco. There were 32 producers in the room, most of whom had brought three wines with them. That's an awful lot of sparkling wine, I thought, as I collected my glass and free Prosecco ballpoint. Talk about being bored to death.
But guess what? I enjoyed some of the wines. The first thing I learnt is that Prosecco isn't supposed to taste like Champagne. Most of it is produced using the less time-consuming Charmat method (refermentation of the base wine in pressurised tanks, as opposed to bottles) and is designed to be drunk young. 'It's all about fruit and freshness,' one producer told me. Unlike Champagne, which derives its richness and flavours from prolonged contact with its (second) fermentation lees, the majority of Prosecco is meant to be light and comparatively simple. Expecting it to be otherwise is like backing Gillingham to win the Premiership.
There is Prosecco and Prosecco, mind you. The best stuff tends to have lower yields, is sourced from hillside sites in the Conegliano-Valdobbiadene district and is left on its lees for a period of time in tank. The worst stuff is thin, characterless and destined for a Bellini, where acidity is more important than fruit concentration and flavour.
Most Prosecco is on the sweet side. Allied to the grape's natural fruitiness, this can make the wines taste a little confected. I pointed this out to one winemaker, but he dismissed my desire to drink drier styles. 'When it's bone dry, it's tongue-cutting stuff,' he said. 'Prosecco is a semi-aromatic variety, so you can't keep the perfume in the wine and keep the sugar low. The more sugar there is in the grapes the more aromatic it is.'
There are three levels of sweetness for Prosecco: Brut (up to 15g of residual sugar), Extra Dry (12-20g) and Dry (20-35g). The top wines from the low-yielding Cartizze sub-zone tend to be pretty sweet, too. Cartizze is described as the 'Grand Cru' of the area, largely because of its ancient soils and steep slopes. The grapes for these wines are generally the ripest (and therefore sweetest) in the region and, more often than not, are bottled as Brut styles. If you serve them as an aperitif, you'll get a shock.
I liked some of the Cartizze wines, but the Proseccos I preferred were the drier ones in the main. As an entry point example, Tesco's Finest Prosecco Brut (£8.99) is creamy and elegant, with fine bubbles and good acidity. Also in a drier style, the Adami Prosecco Valdobbiadene Spumante Brut, Bosco di Gica, Vigneto (£10.65, Astrum, 020 8870 5252) is frothy and fresh with notes of citrus fruit and boiled sweets. Both have 11g of sugar.
My two favourites had considerably more personality than the other wines in the room. The Perlage Prosecco Valdobbiadene Extra Dry, Col di Manza (£9.49, Vinceremos, 0800 107 3086, vinceremos.co.uk) is quite sweet at 19 grams of sugar, but it's a mature, honeyed style with real intensity. It's also the only Prosecco I know of that is both organic and biodynamic.
Equally unusually, the Casa Coste Piane Prosecco Valdobbiadene (£8.79, Les Caves de Pyrène, 01483 538 820) uses the Champagne method (known locally as the metodo ancestrale) to produce a wine that's crisp, complex and refined. Don't be put off by the fact that it's partly cloudy, as the wine is bottled without disgorgement, leaving the spent yeast cells floating in the bottle. If they served this at Harry's Bar, someone would send it back. But don't let that worry you. There are better places to drink Prosecco.
tim.atkin@observer.co.uk