So, I’ve spent two and a half days in Venice, and I’ve now consumed at least eight glasses of prosecco. I’ve had a few glasses of other tasty vino as well, but they haven’t stolen my heart the way prosecco has. Venice has stolen my heart, too, but I expected that. What I didn’t expect was to find so much joy in a glass full of tiny, velvet bubbles.
Now I’m definitely a champagne drinker, but I’m one of those folks for whom champagne brings on instant giddiness, which is good or bad, depending on the handsome-ness of my drinking companion. Champagne also has the effect of producing a rather nasty hangover for me, no matter how little I’ve consumed, or how many oysters I’ve consumed with it. And, as I found out one New Year’s Eve, it’s deadly when I combine it with one tiny martini. (You know who you are, my so-called friends!)
Prosecco is an entirely different story. It’s light, and fulsome, and very smooth. It’s good in the afternoon with all the gentlemen denizens of Le Bistrot de Venise, and it’s good in the evening at Bar Caffe La Piscina on the banks of the Giudecca. It’s good at the Hotel Monaco, facing Santa Maria della Salute in the sunset. (The Monaco is across the calle from Harry’s Bar, and it’s infinitely more restful and just as sophisticated.) I can have a couple of glasses and not become giddy – although the handsome-ness of the Italian waiters definitely warrants a little giddiness – and there’s no follow-on headache that makes me think I should give up drinking and go to Mass. Plenty of places to go to Mass around here, though.
Since internet connections are a little hard to come by here – they don’t seem to just float in the air as they do in California – I’ll have to wait to research prosecco’s availability at home. But rest assured, these Venetians know what they’re doing. And if you can find some excuse to come here and drink it, I highly encourage the endeavor. It’s worth it. That, and the cicchetti. And sunset on the Grand Canal.
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