Posted by Sasha Grigorieva in beverages, wine on June 9, 2007 at 2:49 pm

June is coming on nicely, bringing lots of seasonal fruit in its train, white peaches included. And this is why my post today is about Italian sparkling Prosecco wine. Prosecco + white peaches = Bellini, that enchanting Venetian cocktail, yet another mid-20th century creation of Signore Giuseppe Cipriani at the famous Harry's Bar, a favourite Hemingway haunt in Venice. Together with Harry's Bar carpaccio, the Bellini has taken over the world. By now it has become an international cocktail menu must. Wannabe-Bellinis are even sold bottled, ready-made.

Whereas juice of white peaches is the essential one-third of an authentic Bellini, the other two-thirds must be supplied by Prosecco, a sparkling white wine produced just to the north of Venice in Conegliano-Valdobbiadene region. It is made of the varietal of the same name and it is usually a lovely wine. I have never as yet been disappointed by Prosecco even though I don’t care for sparkling wines. Low in alcohol, pale silvery yellow in colour, with plentiful minute pearly bubbles (the smaller the bubbles the better the quality of sparkling is) this wine often displays a delicate floral and white fruit bouquet.

So after I bought some Californian white peaches (as it is my first summer in Toronto I am not sure whether there would be any white peaches of local origin that would hit the market in July, so I took no chances) this naturally called for some Prosecco. There are currently quite a few different Proseccos at the LCBO and I settled for the $15 bottle (LCBO 340570) produced by Cantina Sociale di Valdobbiadene (local wine-makers’ cooperative union). It is actually quite good on its own, with a hint of citrus fruit in the aroma and a slight pleasant zesty tang in flavour.

But my idea was to do a Bellini-experiment and combine Prosecco with white peaches. Having no juice-pressing gadget and being bone-lazy, I decided to deconstruct the cocktail and to my amazement found that white peaches washed down by Bellini are unusually good (brut doesn’t work well with fruit as a rule) and that the flavours do blend to perfection! So here is something new to bring on a June picnic: a deconstructed Bellini, a bottle of cold Prosecco and a few luscious white peaches.