Extremely online

Regular readers will recall my fondness for Lord Falkland’s observation that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” That crisp declaration is not only elegantly framed but (in my view) true. In this it differs, it saddens me to acknowledge, from the Duke of Cambridge’s even more robust confidence that he was “opposed to all change, at any time, for whatever reason.” I am not sure whether that mot was a testimony to the duke’s utopian inclinations or merely his stubbornness. But it is sharply at odds with the realities, if not, perhaps, with the governing temperament, of most of its main actors in the world of wine.

Compromises are odious. They reek of disappointments both large and small, when no one really gets his way — there’s never a loser per se, but also rarely a winner. But very occasionally, seemingly disparate concepts can come together and create a new thing that is technically a compromise but ends up feeling like more than the sum of its parts, thanks to felicitous, and often impossible to predict, synergies. See: the bánh mì sandwich, the Constitution of the United States, Disney and Pixar. And now: Prosecco. The world’s favorite cheap, cheerful, reliably tasty tipple is dipping its toes into profundity — and the results are surprisingly successful.