Day 28: Salton Intenso Sparkling Brut

This week I’m traveling in Brazil and looking, of course, to put myself in the shoes of a typical wine consumer in Brazil.

When I do that, here are a few things I know:

1. I don’t actually drink much wine — less than half a gallon per year. (A typical consumer in the U.S., by comparison, drinks about three gallons each year.)
2. Brazilian sparkling wines are popular, with a producer called Salton accounting for about 40% of the consumption of those wines.
3. Salton’s entry level bottles start at 10 to 15 reais (or $2.60 to $3.90) per bottle. To put that price in context: a bottle of soda costs 3.5 reais ($0.90), a cappuccino about 4.8 reais ($1.25), and imported beer about 10 reais ($2.60).

Fair enough, and the relative prices are not so very different from costs back home. The reasons why I drink sparkling wine here are also not so different than why I drink it at home. There are the sounds — of the cork popping, of the bubbles fizzing. There’s the lift of sparkling wine — my spirits float higher when I open a bottle or drink a glass, regardless of what else has happened that day. And there’s this sense of what’s next — sparkling wine, for me, has a gush of anticipation about it, a swirl of movement that sets my eyes and my thoughts ahead.

I’m sure I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for sparkling wine, if its current and increasing popularity across all price points is any gauge. That popularity is why Brazilian winemakers are upping production and exports, and it may also be why they’re pricing those exports to fill a space on the shelf that’s opening up as über popular Italian Proseccos step higher up the scale.

So what will a typical American consumer find when it comes to Brazilian sparkling wine on the shelf?

One option will be Salton Intenso Brut, which is already the producer’s best-seller abroad. It’ll cost $12 to $16, and it will be fresh. You’ll find a storm of bubbles in the glass and it’ll smell like pears and white flowers. You’ll open it on a typical weeknight — for that lift I mentioned before — or maybe on your way out on the weekend. It’s a mood setter, or maybe a mood shifter. In either case, it will hit the spot.

Quick Background Note: The Blue Collar Wine Guide is a 30-day, 30-wine experiment that looks at some of the world’s most popular, consumer-friendly wines. The idea is to take off my wine-writer shoes and stand instead in the shoes of Jane-and-Joe-in-front-of-a-wall-of-wine. Thank you for reading today’s post!