Kosher Prosecco: Every Bottle on the Shelf, $9.99 to $27.99

Prosecco is the bottle people reach for when champagne feels like too much money and moscato feels like too much sugar. There are nine of them on our shelf, from ten dollars to twenty-eight, and most of them are mevushal. Here is the whole run, and what separates them.

What Prosecco actually is

An Italian sparkling wine, made from the Glera grape, in a stretch of the Veneto north of Venice. The name is protected — if it does not come from there and is not mostly Glera, it cannot be called Prosecco. You will see DOC on the label, which is the appellation, and it is the thing to look for.

The part that matters to the taste is how the bubbles get in. Champagne ferments a second time inside each individual bottle, slowly, on its own dead yeast, which is where the bready, nutty, biscuit character comes from — and most of the cost. Prosecco does its second fermentation in a big sealed steel tank and then bottles the result. Faster, far cheaper, and it keeps the fruit bright instead of burying it under bread.

So Prosecco tastes of green apple, pear and white flowers. Champagne tastes of toast and almonds. Neither is trying to be the other. We laid the three side by side in champagne vs Prosecco vs cava.

Brut, extra dry, and the label trap

This one catches everybody. On a sparkling wine label, extra dry is sweeter than brut. Not a typo — the terms were set in France in the nineteenth century when everything was much sweeter than it is now, and the scale never got renamed.

Order of dryness, driest first: brut nature, extra brut, brut, extra dry, dry, demi-sec. Most Prosecco is either brut or extra dry, which means most Prosecco is at the dry end with a small amount of sugar left in to soften it. If you want it properly crisp, look for brut.

The shelf, cheapest first

• Bartenura Prosecco Brut, 375ml, $9.99 — the half bottle. Two glasses. OU, mevushal, marked Kosher for Passover. The one to put at each end of a long table, or to open on a Tuesday without committing to a whole bottle.
• Gondola Prosecco, 750ml, $16.99 — the value bottle. Green apple and pear, soft fizz, dry enough to keep pouring. OU, mevushal, Kosher for Passover, 11 percent. This is the one to buy six of for a kiddush.
• Bartenura Prosecco Brut, 750ml, $19.99 — the dry one in the Bartenura range, and worth saying out loud: this is not the blue bottle. Same house, opposite wine. Brisk, fine-bubbled, clean finish. OU, 11 percent.
• Borgo Reale Prosecco Brut, 750ml, $19.99 — pale straw, soft mousse, green apple, properly brut. OU, mevushal, Kosher for Passover, 11 percent. Good with fried fish and smoked salmon.
• Dacci Prosecco DOC, 750ml, $22.99 — 47AD Vineyards, in the faceted crystal-cut bottle. Straightforward and clean. OU plus Rabbi Padwa, mevushal, Kosher for Passover, 11 percent.
• Baglietti Brut Prosecco, 750ml, $22.99 — the driest on the list, and the one with the Badatz Edah HaChareidis hechsher. Mevushal, 11 percent, in the cut-glass bottle. If the table needs a Badatz, this is the sparkling answer.
• Baglietti Brut Rosé, 750ml, $22.99 — the same house and the same Badatz, pink, Glera with a little Pinot Noir. Dry, strawberry on the finish.
• Vera Wang Party Prosecco Rosé, 750ml, $22.99 — 90 percent Glera, 10 percent Pinot Noir, out of Vicenza. OU, mevushal, 11.5 percent.
• Vera Wang Party Prosecco, 750ml, $27.99 — the gift bottle. Gently off-dry, green apple and honeysuckle, and a bottle that gets noticed on a table. OU, mevushal, Kosher for Passover, 11.5 percent.

All nine sit together on the kosher Prosecco shelf.

Mevushal, and why almost all of it is

Seven of the nine are mevushal, which is unusual for a wine category and entirely deliberate. Prosecco gets poured at kiddushim, weddings and brunches where the person holding the bottle is not necessarily the person who owns it, and mevushal removes that whole question. If the phrase is new to you, mevushal vs non-mevushal explains what it means and what it does to the wine.

How to serve it

Cold. Properly cold — around 45 degrees, which is three hours in the fridge or twenty minutes in a bucket of ice and water. Prosecco served cool rather than cold goes flabby and the sugar comes forward.

A flute keeps the bubbles longest. A regular white wine glass gives you more of the pear and flowers and is the better glass if you are actually tasting it rather than toasting with it. Both are fine.

Pour it as an aperitif before the meal, with smoked salmon, with fried fish, with sushi, or into a mimosa at a brunch. It does not want heavy meat, and it does not want dessert — at that end of the meal the sugar in the food will flatten the wine.

Prosecco or moscato?

Different wines that happen to fizz. Moscato is sweet, lower in alcohol, and made from the Muscat grape; Prosecco is dry to off-dry and made from Glera. If the people at your table like the blue bottle, they may find a brut Prosecco startlingly austere. We compared them directly in moscato vs asti vs Prosecco, and there is a separate piece on how sweet moscato really is.

For the bigger picture: the full sparkling shelf runs to ninety bottles, the Italian sparkling shelf to fourteen, and there is a guide to kosher Italian wine as a whole. If champagne is where you are heading instead, what a bottle of champagne costs sets expectations, and the Bartenura range guide covers that house end to end.

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