Prosecco

The village of Prosecco sits on a limestone ridge above Trieste, in the far northeastern corner of Italy. It has been making wine since at least the Roman era — Pliny the Elder mentioned a wine called Pucinum from the same region in his Natural History, around 77 CE. The village's name may come from the Slovenian prosek (a cleared path through forest) or the Latin proseco (to cut ahead). Either way, the village was small, its wines were local, and its name was unremarkable for centuries.

The modern wine called Prosecco comes not from Trieste but from the Veneto hills around Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, about 200 kilometers west. In the sixteenth century, Venetian winemakers began calling their local sparkling wine Prosecco, borrowing the name from the Trieste village to claim an association with ancient Roman winemaking. Whether the grape variety actually originated near Trieste is debated. What matters is that the name migrated from a place to a product.

In 2009, the Italian government reclassified Prosecco as a DOC and DOCG designation — a protected geographic name. To prevent other countries from using the word, they renamed the grape variety from Prosecco to Glera. The village of Prosecco was included in the protected zone specifically so the name would have a geographic anchor. The legal maneuver worked: no one outside northeastern Italy can legally call their wine Prosecco. The village that lent its name became a legal shield.

Prosecco production reached 635 million bottles in 2022. It outsells Champagne globally. The drink that English-speaking consumers buy for brunch or mix into spritzes is named after a village of about 1,000 people above the Adriatic, a village that most Prosecco drinkers could not locate on a map and that most Prosecco grapes have never been near.