Premium Prosecco will endure as it offers consumers both luxury and value

Prosecco is suffering from an identity crisis. Originally seen as an alternative to Cava and even Champagne, some people now see it as having ‘sold out’ and become just too popular for its own good.

Indeed overall sales of Prosecco have slowed down and people have started to look elsewhere for sparkling wines, such as Crémant from France, Sekt from Germany and English Sparkling wines.

However, online wine retailer Rude Wines caters for the more discerning Prosecco drinker and continues to offer premium Prosecco as a great value, great tasting alternative to the more expensive English Sparkling wine and Champagne.

Sales manager Deborah Guest says “Prosecco is well established now as one of the most popular sparkling wines. We are not worried about the overall slowing in sales of Prosecco as we believe that we have the best premium Proseccos around and their quality has not gone unnoticed. The attractive price point of premium Prosecco will ensure it stays a fixture in wine glasses across the land. Our customers love the fact that premium Prosecco can be aged for up to 7 years and tell us they enjoy tasting how the wine evolves in a bottle”. Lower quality prosecco should be drunk while still fresh and within three years of production.

Deborah believes that premium Prosecco will endure and lower quality ones will eventually be overlooked. She says “We are not interested in a race to the bottom with regards to price. We believe you get what you pay for and the Proseccos we sell don’t claim to be the cheapest but I believe they offer a superior flavour and finer bubbles and is more food-friendly. Our Proseccos are made by winemakers who value quality over quantity and tend to plant on cooler hillside sites which are at a premium and produce better quality grapes. Our own brand Rude Prosecco Brut (on offer at £9.29) is a finalist in the People’s Choice Wine Awards 2019 in the category for Fabulous Fizz: best Sparkling Wine Rest of the World. We have everything crossed to win”.

Rude’s Val d’Oca Prosecco Superiore Valdobbiadene (on offer at £10.99) is also a firm customer favourite and caught the attention of the Independent when it voted it as one of their top 10 Proseccos. Wine writer Tom Cannavan has also endorsed Rude’s Val d’Oca Prosecco and says it is ‘one of the less expensive wines in a Premium Prosecco taste-off I held recently, and one of my favourites – that was for its sheer zing and zip’. Deborah describes it as a “drier style of Prosecco which makes it more similar in style to Champagne. This makes it excellent with food, especially with seared fish and scallops. It’s not just a frivolous fizz for parties, it has a real depth of flavour and I think this is why it has remained so popular with our customers. Both of these wines are in our ever popular mixed case of Prosecco which currently has £20 off”.

Premium Proseccos tend to come from hillside sites where nights are cooler and the grapes ripen more slowly as they are not always in direct sunlight like the ones growing on flatter areas. This retains the acidity in the grapes and results in fresher tasting wines, but still with plenty of fruit character.

Although it’s only relatively recently that Prosecco has been discovered by the UK wine drinker, it’s been produced in the Veneto region of North East Italy since around the Roman Empire if not before.

Rude Wines are an independent online wine merchant who has set out to discover some of the world’s ‘off-the-beaten-track’ wines. Stocking wines from countries as diverse as Peru, Uruguay, and Israel, as well as delving deeper into the more familiar wine territories.