[free] In the Prosecco chamber

Champagne likes to think it isn't competing with Prosecco. Netflix says otherwise

Keira Knightley in Netflix’s spy series Black Doves

Keira Knightley - the future Prime Minister’s wife - is addressing a room of simpering socialites and government types. There are crystal glasses, bespoke flower arrangements and expensive-looking lighting fixtures. As she rolls out a gently self-effacing speech, well-moisturised lips rise and fall like theatre curtains over perfect teeth in appreciation. It’s all terribly, terribly posh.

Then, a line which, to anyone working in an around the Champagne industry, ought to send shivers down spines:

“This Chinese ambassador situation needs some attention. Don’t worry, Em’s staying, though.”

More teeth-flashing from ‘Em’. “I’m just going to station myself by the door the Prosecco comes out of!”

…Prosecco!

These people, these masters of the universe (well, the British Universe), these glamourpusses and ageing rugger-buggers, aren’t serving Champagne. What gives?

Now, as government employees living in London, I suppose it’s possible that Prosecco is all they can afford (Boris Johnson once famously said he couldn’t afford enough childcare on his Prime Ministerial salary of £150,000 living in London, and I had to admit he had a point - even if he has quite a few children). But come on; TV writers don’t write about actual middle-income London. Even Paddington appears to live in a grand mansion in Notting Hill on the salary of a mid-level insurance analyst and illustrator. In London, on TV, you are either working class, or rich.

But even Paddington would probably stretch to own label champagne, surely? As a bear with standards?

I have heard in Champagne, a number of times, words to the effect that the region is not in competition with the Northern Italians and their cheap fizz. That these are two very different products, at different prices. To some extent, I buy - or want to buy - the comfort of this illusion, which takes the sting out of the numbers, at least; Champagne is back to sales levels of twenty years ago, with few signs of recovery in the short term, whilst Prosecco continues to soar to over twice Champagne’s numbers.

It’s hard to hold the line, though, when you see a bunch of posh people drinking Prosecco without a)irony or b)self-awareness. Prosecco used to be a bit of an apology; if you served it at a fundraising event, it was because you needed £350 for a drains survey at the village hall, not £80,000 for a new Chapel roof at your old prep school. Has everything turned on its head? Is Prosecco now a form of class messaging? A way of saying “We’re just ordinary folks”?

Someone, I’m sure, could write a social theory of the Scotch Egg in a similar vein; nested somewhere in its modern transformation from working-class snack to hors-d’oeurve is surely a dash of what academics call “The Poor Fetish”. Salman Rushdie talks of how we send thoughts and feelings through the food we feed people Midnight’s Children - there are Kormas “vengeance-spiced with forebodings” and “birianis of dissension”. And maybe, now, “Prosecco of humility”.

Prosecco is allowed to be bling, because it’s cheap, and everyone knows it’s cheap. Something has changed, though; we used to be able to laugh at it, but now we seem to be laughing with it. It has joined the ranks of permissible ‘naughty’ consumables that qualify as treats without being a)expensive or b)particularly nice. Nor does it have to communicate its worthiness; for wine, as for food, everyday food has to be nutritious and ethically sourced, naughty food is allowed to be unhealthy and planet-destroying, and expensive food has to be…nutritious and ethically sourced, again.

Whether the writers of Netflix’s Black Doves put so much thought into the choice of what fills those crystal glasses, or whether it simply slipped in, it was a moment which stuck with me during yesterday’s chat with Caroline Henry. Prosecco is no longer just for the people sitting on the sofa watching Netflix - it’s for the people on-screen, too. And that, bubbleheads, is a story worth watching as closely as sales numbers, exports, costs and tariffs. Because it’s the story of why we drink what we drink.

(*I actually have nothing against Prosecco, although most of my consumption of it happens inside a Campari Spritz…)

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Recently for paid subscribers to Six Atmospheres: I took a look at the recent Wine Lister report into the English Sparkling Wine Market: