Prosecco

Running the second fermentation in a large sealed tank takes weeks rather than years, and the wine spends very little time in contact with spent yeast. That is deliberate rather than a shortcut. Glera has delicate aromatics that long lees ageing would bury under bread and toasted nuts, so the method exists to keep the fruit at the front of the wine. What arrives in the glass tastes of pear, green apple and white blossom, and it is meant to be drunk while all of that is still fresh.

The grape once shared its name with the wine, which made that name almost impossible to protect, since anyone anywhere could plant it and use the word on a label. The grape was renamed Glera and the wine name was tied instead to a defined production zone in northeastern Italy. Anything sparkling and Italian made outside that zone has to call itself something else. It is a useful reminder that a wine name can describe a place, a grape or a method, and rarely all three.

The broad DOC zone spreads across the Veneto and Friuli and accounts for most of what is exported. The DOCG tier sits on the steep hills between Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, and on the hills of Asolo, where vineyards are worked by hand because machines cannot climb them.

Lees contact, almost entirely. The bready, nutty character of a traditional-method wine comes from months or years on dead yeast cells inside the bottle. Prosecco spends a fraction of that time on lees in a tank, so what reaches you instead is the primary fruit.

No. This is a style built to be drunk young, and the aromatics that make it worth opening fade rather than develop. A bottle that has sat around for two or three years tastes tired next to a recent one. Keep it cold and dark.