Did you know that “Prosecco gets its sparkles from injecting CO2”?

This is totally wrong. Prosecco is made following the Charmat or Martinotti method, where the second fermentation takes place in the tank, however, this was the description I read on an award winning wine merchant according to their website. It reinforce my opinion on awards.

I came across their website when looking to see whether the Alta Langa appellation were known in the UK - I don’t think I ever come across one, we recently added one to our range. In case you did not know, the Alta Langa is a DOCG appellation for classic method sparkling wine made from grapes grown in the Langhe, in Piedmont. I could not find much other than a few articles on why the wine deserves to be taken seriously, including one from Decanter.

As we all know and have experienced, as soon as we search for something on google or any other search engine, suddenly we start seeing plenty of adverts on our feeds showing us the product or feature we searched for.

A few days later I was shown, unexpectedly, an image of a Alta Langa wine from a UK based merchant so I clicked. On the first paragraph, the description said that “prosecco gets its sparkles from injecting CO2” and Alta Langa was “made the proper way”. Classic method are better than Charmat wines, at least in theory, but Prosecco is not made by injecting CO2 in the bottle and there isn’t a proper way to make sparkling wine, they are just two different methods producing totally different wines.

The information is deceiving and the differences between the sparkling wine methods is included - I never read it but I am certain - in the "wine for dummies" book and it is not the sort of wrong information you expect to find on a wine merchant website, even less an award winning merchant, a multi award winning merchant, according to their website, a Decanter and an International Wine Challenge winner. I am not sharing the wine merchant name because this is not the point.

For the following days I kept thinking about it and reached the following conclusions. As you probably already know, at Italyabroad.com we don’t enter competitions or awards, we only did a couple of times initially, until we understood how they work and seeing that, it made me very proud of our choice. We go on our own way and believe we are doing good for Italian wine and wine in general and the saving we make from not entering competitions and awards are passed to our customers.

Second, nowadays, unfortunately, anyone can sell wine, online or not. I believe this is possible because there is still little knowledge about wine. Third, no matter the effort, the hard work, it can feels defeating. If you are a wine merchant that knows about wine and your wines as we are, that goes out and search for gems from unknown small, independent, producers, that try to educate wine drinkers, sometimes it feels like a David vs Goliath fight but we are not giving up.. yet.