Peppy Prosecco at Zoes, Beverly Farms
Posted 04/19/2008 at 11:27 AM by Cathy
Peppy Prosecco
The very first wine on the list at Zoës Tapas + Bar is the Zonin Prosecco Special Cuvée Brut. We were feeling, well, peppy tonight and a Prosecco seemed to fit the mood. The share-everything mentality of a tapas place did nothing to quench the peppy fire. So Prosecco it was.
This Prosecco, though, was not at all what we expected.
Why not?
It was dry.
“But that’s what Brut means,” you might say, and you’d be right. Brut, when referring to a sparkling wine (usually Champagne), means dry or almost-dry. Some part of my brain remembered that. It must have been the part distracted by being peppy though, because when I took the first sip it was like culture shock in my mouth.
That brought me back to Earth, in a hurry. I was never very good at peppy.
We all had our expectations of Prosecco, namely, that it has a fair amount of sweetness to it. Sweet-ish wines in general tend to be saved for the end of the meal rather than the beginning, except for Prosecco. I’ve heard (and bought into) the argument that there is no better aperitif-style wine than Prosecco, and no better way to get a meal or a party started than with this enormously popular sparkling wine.
That’s what we were looking for, and that’s what we were expecting. And then we tasted it. And we tasted dry.
Everyone went silent. Not so peppy anymore.
“The bubbles slow down the way I’m drinking this wine,” my friend ventured, after a long moment. Maybe. But – knowing that this particular friend has no trouble whatsoever drinking other glasses of sparkling wines in fairly quick order – my money was on the dryness of the wine slowing him down, not the bubbles.
It wasn’t that the wine was bad. It was perfectly fine for what it was. What it was, was dry Prosecco, exactly as advertised.
The bad news was that a dry sparkling wine put a bit of a damper on our mood. At first. The good news was that we realized how key of a role wine plays in the mood of a table. The better news was that we got over our initial disappointment of failed expectations and channeled the energy into getting to know a new style of wine.
The best news of all? Peppy does have its place. It may be alongside non-Brut Prosecco, but it’s a place nonetheless.
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About the Author
Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.
Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.
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