Prosecco is the light tasting and sparkling wine perfect for celebrations, luncheons and wiling away warm and lazy afternoons. Our selection has been carefully curated by our wine experts who have tasted each and every wine, describing our entire collection and choosing only the best available for inclusion. With over 70 years of wine history, The Wine Collective brings you a premier selection of the finest quality vintages and wineries from small and medium sized producers here in Australia and from around the world, available to order online with delivery direct to your door.

If you enjoy a dry white wine like a Pinot Noir or a Pinot Grigio, or sweet white wines like a Semillon or other dessert wine varieties like Moscato, you will definitely enjoy a glass of chilled and bubbling Prosecco. This fruity tasting wine enjoys a spectrum of attributes including dry citrus flavours, warm and sweet apple flavours, and subtle notes of peach with a crisp finish. 

Like the Champagne region of France, Prosecco owes its origins to the cool climate vineyards from Northern Italy. Vineyards around this area have been making wine for millennia, stretching back before the rise and fall of the Roman empire. What we know to be Prosecco now has enjoyed only relatively recent success on this long spectrum of history, with popularity for sparkling varieties hitting their peak in the eighteenth century, tapering off at the turn of the twentieth century and then exploding again in popularity from the 1950’s onwards. 

Also, like champagne, the taste for sparkling wines like Prosecco proved more popular outside of their traditional wine-making regions and markets than with the Italian locals who were making it. The rise of sparkling varieties owes its provenance to international markets in Britain and the United States who enjoyed the characteristic fizz and pop produced in every bottle that had for so long been considered a ‘failed’ vintage by master winemakers. The history of the fizz in, including Prosecco and champagne, Sparkling Riesling and Sparkling Chardonnay, and now available in red wine varieties like Sparkling Shiraz Cabernet, lies in its production climate. To create the characteristic bubbles in Prosecco, the wine must undergo a two-stage fermentation process that occurs first in the cask and then in the bottle itself. 

Yeast used in the fermentation of grape juice to produce wine is introduced to the cask or barrel and there it breeds, feeding on the natural sugars of the fruit juice, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide as natural by-products. Fermentation is complete once the yeast has eaten all of the available sugars and can no longer sustain itself. It dies off and then the wine is transferred from the cask to the bottle to be stored. Traditional wine yeasts used for fermentation preferred warmer weather to complete their work in the cask. In cooler weather, they would fall dormant before finishing off all of the natural sugars and would then be bottled along with the wine, unbeknownst by the winemaker.

Once bottled, and once the weather warmed up enough again, the yeast would reactivate and finish what they started, but this time in the confines of the glass bottle rather than in the much roomier cask. When yeast produces carbon dioxide as well as alcohol throughout the fermentation process in the cask, this gas is allowed to rise naturally to the top of the liquid and disperse. In the bottle, under the pressure of a cork, none of that gas was able to escape and so that pressure would either build until the bottle could no longer contain it, or would remain until the wine was ready to be drunk, escaping in the beloved pop we look forward to with every bottle of Prosecco. 

Before the rise and popularity of fizzing wine, winemakers would often lose entire years’ worth of work in a single explosive incident, not understanding this secondary fermentation process and how it produced significant amounts of pressure within each bottle. When a single bottle exploded, it would often set off a chain reaction amongst the rest of the rows, devastating the vintage. 

Although traditional winemakers were appalled by what they considered to be flaws in the wine, wine drinkers thought otherwise and learning why wine fizzed, how to control it and how to develop its unique properties through experimentation with alternate grape varieties became vital in international wine markets. There was an enormous call for fizzing sweet wine, for both the novelty of the bottles and for also the taste. 

Is Prosecco sweet?

Glera grapes are the most commonly used grape variety in the production of Prosecco. Believed to have originally come from Slovenia, North-eastern Italian winemakers cultivated the variety in their cooler climate wine regions where it flourished and Australian winemakers have continued the tradition in ideal climates throughout the King Valley and Yarra Valley. 

Prosecco is generally sweet tasting, not unlike French brut champagne, enjoying mellow and citrus flavours which makes it perfect to drink chilled and with a variety of foods. It complements seafood especially well and varieties like the Innocent Bystander Prosecco from the King Valley, with its lower alcohol content of 9%, make it the perfect sipping sparkler at lunch or as an aperitif mixed with orange juice at brunch in a traditional Mimosa cocktail. 

How to store Prosecco unopened?

Prosecco, like champagne, enjoys its natural fizz under pressure so if you have a bottle – or two – keep it chilled before opening. Chilling fizzing wine will slow down the release of its natural gases when opened and keeping it chilled while drinking will ensure your bubbles last longer. You’ll enjoy glass after glass of refreshing, sweet and bubbly wine when the bottle is stored in a bucket of ice. 

Once opened, however, the bubbles will natural escape regardless of the temperature. It can still be stored in the fridge after opening but there will be fewer and fewer bubbles with every glass after that.

Is Prosecco better than champagne?

Champagne has enjoyed a long and lustrous history of prestige, cornering the market on sparkling wine throughout the world since the eighteenth century. It was in Champagne that winemakers finally mastered the process of riddling which removed yeast sediment left over from the second fermentation process that gives sparkling wine it’s signature bubbles, and this process improved the taste of the wine considerably without losing any of those novelty bubbles.

However, the eighteenth century was a long time ago and winemaking and experimentation has come a long way in the intervening time. Prosecco has become a world-favourite with more and more examples of this stunning style producing more and more awards from some of the most prestigious wine awarding events and bodies from around the world. If you enjoy light tasting wines that are ideally suited for meals, wiling away warm and lazy afternoons or celebrating in style, Prosecco is definitely an option you should be considering and whether it’s better than traditional champagne will come down to the winemaker and the drinker. 

The Wine Collective owes its roots to Australia’s oldest wine club founded in 1946 – The Wine Society. Over the last 70 or so years, The Wine Society has been introducing Australians to the best wines from here at home, as well as from around the world, and we continue to curate expert collections for your enjoyment through The Wine Collective. You can now order our complete collection for delivery direct to your door, anywhere in Australia. Browse our selection of rose wine, chardonnay, shiraz, sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon, riesling, merlot, tempranillo, sangiovese, grenache and cabernet merlot from winemakers including, Vasse Felix, Crackerjack and Paringa Estate.

Our collections have been sourced from small and medium sized authentic winemakers who are passionate about their production and delivering the finest tasting wines possible. Order online today or speak with a wine expert about where to start.