Stand in front of the Prosecco shelf in any supermarket and you'll see two bottles from the same producer, same price, same label — one marked Brut, one marked Extra Dry. Most people reach for the Extra Dry on the sensible assumption that it's the drier of the two. It isn't. Extra Dry is the sweeter one. Brut is drier than Extra Dry, and Dry — the word that sounds driest of all — is sweeter than both. The labelling is a nineteenth-century accident that nobody has had the nerve to fix, and it's the single most common way people buy the wrong Prosecco.

This is the wine underneath half the drinks on this site — every Spritz, the Bellini, the Sbagliato — and it's also the one almost nobody reads the label of. Three words decide what's in the bottle: the appellation (DOC or DOCG), the sweetness (Brut or Extra Dry), and the fizz (Spumante or Frizzante). Learn those three and you'll never buy the wrong one again.

First, the grape that lost its name

Prosecco is made from a grape that, until 2009, was itself called Prosecco. That year the Italian authorities renamed the grape Glera, so that "Prosecco" could be locked down as a place name — a protected appellation, like Champagne — rather than a grape anyone anywhere could grow. The name originally comes from a village called Prosecco near Trieste, in the far north-east; the grape, and the wine, had been spreading west across the Veneto for a couple of centuries before the lawyers caught up.

The practical upshot: a bottle can only say Prosecco if it's made from at least 85% Glera, in a defined zone of north-east Italy. Anything else with bubbles is just sparkling wine.

Word one: DOC or DOCG

This is the appellation, and it tells you where the grapes grew, which is the biggest single predictor of quality.

Prosecco DOC is the broad zone — nine provinces across the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, mostly flat farmland. This is the bulk of all Prosecco made, and the bulk of what you'll find on a supermarket shelf for €6–€10. Perfectly good. Fresh, simple, fruity. What a Spritz is built on. You'll sometimes see Prosecco DOC Treviso, which is a tighter sub-zone around the city of Treviso and a modest step up.

Prosecco DOCG — the G is for garantita, guaranteed — is the hills. There are two:

Inside Conegliano Valdobbiadene there are two further grades worth knowing. Rive — "slopes" — means the wine comes from a single named village or hillside, like a Burgundy village. And Cartizze is the top of the pyramid: a single 107-hectare hill above Valdobbiadene, the most prized site in the whole appellation, bottled as Superiore di Cartizze. It's rich, slightly sweet, and starts around €25. It is not for Spritzes. Putting Cartizze in a Spritz is the Prosecco equivalent of using a Barolo for sangria.

Word two: Brut or Extra Dry

This is the sweetness, and it's the word that trips people up. The scale runs from driest to sweetest like this:

So Extra Dry sits above Brut on the sugar scale, and Dry is sweeter still. The terms were set when all sparkling wine was quite sweet and "dry" meant "less sweet than usual" — and then the world's taste moved towards bone-dry while the labels stayed put. Champagne has the same scale. Prosecco inherited the confusion.

Here's the part that matters: Extra Dry is the traditional, most common Prosecco style, and it's what most Italian producers consider the natural expression of the grape — the little bit of residual sugar rounds off Glera's acidity and lifts its pear-and-apple fruit. Brut is the modern, drier fashion, growing fast. Neither is wrong. They're for different jobs.

Word three: Spumante or Frizzante

This is the fizz. Spumante means fully sparkling — a proper, persistent bead of bubbles and a cork held on with a wire cage. Frizzante means lightly sparkling, gentler and lower-pressure, often sealed with a simple string-tied cork or a crown cap. Frizzante is what you'll get by the glass in a bar in the Veneto and it's cheaper; Spumante is the one for a Spritz, where you want the bubbles to survive being mixed with Aperol and ice. There's technically a still version too, Tranquillo, but you'll almost never meet it.

Why it doesn't taste like Champagne (and isn't trying to)

Champagne gets its bubbles from a second fermentation inside each individual bottle, then sits on its dead yeast for months, often years, which is where the bready, toasty, brioche flavours come from. Prosecco does its second fermentation in a large sealed steel tank — the Charmat or Martinotti method — over a few weeks, then bottles the result under pressure. No years on yeast, no toast. What you get instead is the fresh, floral, green-apple-and-pear character of the Glera grape itself, more or less untouched.

That isn't a lesser method; it's a different goal. Champagne is built to taste of the process. Prosecco is built to taste of the fruit, young and cold. Judge each by its own aim and the comparison stops being an insult to either.

One exception worth chasing: Col Fondo (or sui lieviti). This is the old farmhouse method — a second fermentation in the bottle, with the yeast left in and never removed. The wine comes out cloudy, bone dry, slightly funky and yeasty, with a crown cap. It's the Prosecco the region drank before the tank method took over, and a small band of producers has revived it. It's not for a Spritz. It's for drinking cold on its own, and it'll change your idea of what the grape can do.

Which bottle for which job

For a Spritz: Prosecco DOC, Spumante, Brut. Our spirits cabinet guide says the same. The Aperol brings all the sweetness the drink needs; a Brut keeps it from turning syrupy. €7–€10. Do not spend more — the bitter will flatten any nuance you paid for.

For a Bellini: Prosecco DOC, Extra Dry. This is the one place the sweeter style wins — the touch of sugar meets the white peach exactly as Cipriani intended. Our Bellini recipe goes into why.

For drinking on its own: step up to DOCG. Conegliano Valdobbiadene Superiore, Brut or Extra Dry depending on your taste, €12–€20. For a special bottle, a Rive or a Cartizze. For the curious, a Col Fondo.

Always: cold — 6 to 8°C, straight from the fridge — and in a white-wine glass rather than a narrow flute if you want to actually smell it. The flute looks the part and strangles the aroma.

The shelf

Back to those two bottles. Now you know what to do: Brut for the Spritz, Extra Dry for the Bellini or for drinking on its own if you like a softer glass, and a DOCG from the hills when the wine is the point rather than the mixer. It took three words. Everyone else in the aisle is still guessing.