Bellini
White peach puree lengthened with Prosecco, poured and stirred rather than shaken.
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A pink-orange Bellini in a champagne flute on a white tablecloth
Serving
Drink spec, per drink
Every figure above is per drink and does not move with the count, which is what makes the two service modes comparable. Sugar per litre, strength and standard drinks stay in the units their own authorities publish, because they are figures for comparing rather than for pouring.
Wine is routinely fined with isinglass, gelatine or casein, and a producer rarely states whether a given bottle was.
Diet and allergen labels are computed from the ingredients listed on this page and nothing else. They cannot account for cross-contamination or for the particular product you buy, and they are not medical or safety guidance.
Ingredients
50 ml white peach puree
100 ml brut sparkling wine
- 50 ml white peach puree
- 100 ml brut sparkling wine
Glass
Vessel
150 ml of liquid, served without ice, inside the 180 ml the glass holds. The build fails if a recipe ever exceeds its stated vessel.
A batch needs a vessel that closes and fits a fridge shelf.
Method
3 steps · 1m 5sChill the flute. A Bellini has no ice in the glass, so the glass itself carries all of the cold.
Pour the 50 ml white peach puree into the chilled glass, then top with the 100 ml brut sparkling wine.
Stir for 15s with a bar spoon to bring the puree up through the wine, rather than swirling the glass, which throws off the bead.
The puree is heavier than the wine and settles, so the glass is stirred gently rather than poured and left; a Bellini that separates into two layers has simply not been stirred yet.
Common pitfallYellow peaches carry more acidity and a stronger colour than the white peach the drink was built on, and a puree made from them tips the drink sourer and more orange than the pale pink original.
Keeping and make-ahead
Batched ahead, this keeps sealed and cold. The water line the engine adds is the dilution figure from the spec panel, not a rule of thumb.
About
White peach puree topped with Prosecco, created at Harry's Bar in Venice and named for a Renaissance painter whose pinks the drink's colour recalled.
The drink is credited to Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry's Bar on the edge of Venice's Grand Canal 1. He combined fresh-pressed white peach with Prosecco, drawing on an older Italian habit of marinating peaches in wine, and named the result after Giovanni Bellini, the 15th-century Venetian painter whose canvases favoured the same pink the drink turned out 1.
The date of the first pour is not settled. Difford's Guide places it in 1945, fourteen years after Cipriani opened the bar 1, while other accounts put the invention anywhere from the mid-1930s to 1948, with no source giving a more exact date 2.
The drink began as a summer-only specialty, limited by the short season for fresh white peaches; it became available year-round only once a supplier began shipping peach puree to Harry's Bar and its later New York branch 2. Its short list of ingredients has since been carried into a family of related drinks at the same bar and elsewhere, substituting other purees for the peach (strawberry for a Rossini, raspberry for a Tintoretto), none of which are the Bellini itself.
- 1Bellini (Difford's recipe)diffordsguide.com
- 2Bellini (cocktail)en.wikipedia.org