A Croatian wine, Prosek, seeks an official designation, and Prosecco makers are up in arms. But they also can’t agree on what, exactly, should be called Prosecco. A Croatian wine, Prosek, seeks an official designation, and Prosecco makers are up in arms. But they also can’t agree on what, exactly, should be called Prosecco. Prosecco vineyards in the hillsides and within the town of Valdobbiadene, Italy. Credit… Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York TimesVALDOBBIADENE, ITALY — Small pickup trucks carrying mounds of green grapes wound through Prosecco Road. Workers harvesting in the terraced vineyards squinted in the sun. Tipsy tourists stopped in for tastings. Couples clinked glasses in the town’s quaint Prosecco bars. But behind the effervescent front, producers of Italy’s wildly popular sparkling white wine in the northeastern Veneto region were on war footing.“I feel like I’m going to battle,” said Elvira Maria Bortolomiol as she pantomimed carrying a rifle in an airy tasting room next to her vineyards. An owner of the Bortolomiol winery and new president of a consortium of producers, Ms. Bortolomiol said a surprise attack had “disoriented us.”War and internal strife have come to Prosecco country. The European Union, in a major buzz kill for a Spritz-fueled multibillion euro industry, last month agreed to consider a longstanding application by Croatia to recognize Prosek, a method of making an obscure sweet — and still — dessert wine of the same name. Big Prosecco has fought off myriad other salvos — counterfeits like Meer-secco and Cansecco, and the warnings of British dentists about sugary spumante rotting the country’s teeth. But tiny Prosek, a legitimately old wine from an E. U. member state, presented a unique threat. A significant slice of the Italian economy is built on typically Italian products with names, and sounds, protected from imitation. If the E. U. allowed Prosek today, producers argue, could Farmesan be far behind? And so Prosecco producers and local officials have joined Italy’s government to crush Prosek. The argument is that recognition by Brussels would confuse consumers and set a dangerous precedent.“Recognizing Prosek could legitimize a ton of other products that are imitations,” said Luca Giavi, the president of the Consortium to Protect Prosecco. As if demonstrating the yield of a D. E. A. drug bust, he put seized Romanian “Pro-Secco,” a 10-pack of glitter “Prosecco Bath Bombs” and Prosecco Princess Shower Gel on the table of his headquarters. “The important thing is to have an enemy,” he said. “It unites us.”In a dark and vaulted cellar under a stone Prosecco museum on the Valdobbiadene hillside, Enrico Bortolomiol — Ms. Bortolomiol’s first cousin — argued that the conflict over the Croatian wine presented a rare chance to advance a radical agenda: The time had come to ditch the name Prosecco.
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