spumante

He points to the Citronnade a la Menthe, served at his restaurants, which is a "a play on the traditional mint lemonade served in French bistros. We prepare a cardamom lemon cordial and mix it with Moroccan tea before lightly fermenting for 48 hours. This doesn't add any discernible alcohol, less than a kombucha, but does lighten the sugar content and add a spumante amount of fizz."

The third is a charming Italian spumante from Campania that takes us on time travel back to an ancient era.

Mellisoni Vineyards 2020 Bollicine Dry Bubbly muscat canelli, Columbia Valley, $60: This beautifully tropical aperitif features co-winemaker Donna Mellison on the label and uses the Italian word for bubbles to toast in an Asti spumante fashion.

With his back to dusty bottles of the hill’s best spumante through the decades, he sat with tented hands on an elevated seat and argued that the good name of Prosecco had been irrevocably sullied by overproduction on the mechanically harvested and viticulturally uninteresting provinces that accounted for 500 million of the 600 million bottles on the market.

Call it Conegliano Valdobbiadene Superior Spumante, or some permutation thereof, as long as the wine was explicitly tied to its traditional, and inimitable, territory.