In the spring of 2019 the Prosecco hills set me a riddle.
Under the rules of Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore DOCG at the time, a producer could make a sparkling wine with almost no sugar at all, labelled Brut Nature or Dosaggio Zero, and sell it without any trouble. What they could not do was put Extra Brut on the label, a style that allows a little more sugar than Brut Nature and a good deal less than Brut.
You could have next to none, or you could have plenty, but a modest helping was against the rules. I emailed the Consorzio to check I had read this correctly, and I had.
The question that sent me looking came up over afternoon tea, and it was about how much sugar a sparkling wine needs.
Sit in a new car these days and you can barely feel the machinery beneath you. You glide along, and whatever is getting you down the road has been tucked away behind a screen. The exception is something low-slung like a Lamborghini, where you sit close enough to the tarmac to feel every ripple in the road.
Taking the sugar out of sparkling wine has a similar effect. The dosage, the sweetening added before the wine is bottled, smooths the ride. Remove it and you feel every bump. Whether that gives you the Lamborghini or a Model T Ford with hard metal seats depends on the wine in your glass.
The tasting
In March 2019 the Consorzio brought 42 producers to The Hari hotel in Belgravia for an afternoon tea hosted by Sarah Abbott MW. We worked our way up through the sugar levels, starting with zero dosage and finishing with the sweeter styles.
The driest wines, I was told, are largely drunk at home in Italy. The British like a touch of sweetness in their Prosecco, and the UK market leans heavily towards the less expensive Prosecco DOC over the Superiore DOCG, which suits a drink that tends to be poured for friends, often with no food in sight.
The afternoon tea made a good case for the drier wines all the same. The savoury plates worked well with the zero dosage Prosecco Superiore, while the familiar sweeter styles kept their edge with the cakes.
Whether the casual Prosecco drinker will follow is another matter. The appetite for “zero sugar” drinks of every kind may help, although anyone choosing Brut Nature for its calorie count should know it can still carry up to 3 g/l of sugar, and the alcohol is very much present.
The troublemaker
The wine I enjoyed above all the others was a Frizzante made in the Col Fondo style. Credamora, from the producer Malibràn, is refermented in the bottle and left unfiltered on its lees, so it pours cloudy, with softer bubbles and something of the spirit of a pét-nat. I was told the name means something close to “troublemaker”, which seems fair for a wine that puts the yeast back into Prosecco. It had more depth of flavour than its clear neighbours and belongs to a small niche, but it showed how much variety these hills can produce.
Prosecco has been one of the commercial successes of sparkling wine, and at the time it was said to be taking sales from cheaper own-label Champagne. The Superiore producers knew they would need to keep moving to stay ahead of the much larger DOC.
As for the riddle, it didn’t last long. A few months after this tasting the rules were revised, and Extra Brut joined the permitted styles. The modest helping of sugar is now allowed, and wines refermented in bottle, the troublemakers among them, have found a place in the rules too.
Archive note (October 2026)
This post was first published in April 2019, after a tasting held by the Consorzio di Tutela del Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore at The Hari hotel in Belgravia, London. Wine Woman & Song is now an archive, and the post has been edited for republication with corrections and updates on what has changed since.
The rules have changed. A few months after the tasting, the gap the Consorzio explained to me was closed. New production regulations for the DOCG came into force on 8 August 2019 and applied from that year’s vintage. They added Extra Brut, with residual sugar of 0 to 6 g/l, to the permitted styles of Spumante Superiore. They also created Sui Lieviti, a category for sparkling wines refermented in the bottle and left on their lees, which must be made in the Brut Nature style. Col Fondo-style Frizzante wines like Credamora sit in their own category in the rules, as Frizzante refermented in bottle. The same revision limited the Rive designation to steeper hillside sites and gave those wines a later release date.
A significant year for the hills. In 2019 the Prosecco hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene were also recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for their landscape and long history of cultivation. In the same year the denomination banned the herbicide glyphosate, which made it the largest wine area in Europe to do so.
Labelling. For readers who choose drier styles for their lower sugar, labelling has improved since this was written, at least within the EU. Under EU Regulation 2021/2117, wines produced from 8 December 2023 and sold in the EU must show their energy value on the label, with a full nutrition declaration (including sugars) and an ingredients list available either on the bottle or through a QR code. These rules apply in Northern Ireland but not in Great Britain, although many bottles sold in Great Britain carry the same labels, since producers often print one label for several markets. Wines made before December 2023 can still be sold under the old labelling until stocks run out.
Producer ranges, wine names and styles may have changed since 2019, so the wines described here are a record of that afternoon and may not reflect what is made today.
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