Italian without the sparkle

It should have been the perfect night for it. A temperature in the mid-twenties, after eight months of meteorological purgatory. The sudden burgeoning of three million female summer wardrobes. Prosecco is made for nights like this. It's the perfect drink to sip in a state of easy vacancy as you enjoy the allure of strangers. To do so in the people-busy, car-free squares of Venice or Verona, I'd say, is to coax idleness towards perfection.

Good news, thus, that a "proseccheria" (ie, a spot for serving prosecco) had opened up in London, I felt. Prosecco is the Veneto's undemanding answer to champagne. It's pale green, gently fizzy and tastes of pears and toast. Much of its popularity is based on the fact that it is markedly less dry than champagne. The fact, too, that prosecco is what you mix with peach juice to make a classic bellini (the iconic cocktail from Harry's Bar in Venice) lends it further credibility.

You might guess that the memorable name is invented, but not so. Prosecco is a grape variety, widely grown in the province of Treviso, with the most coming from the DOC zone of Conegliano-Valdobbadiene; Venice is less than an hour away. Cartizze is the name of a superior sub-zone.

All of the prosecchi I have tried in the past have been simple things, obviously the result of heavy-bearing vines combined with neutral, industrial winemaking. There are others, though - famed producers like Ruggeri, Le Colture and Bisol. A proseccheria would be just the place, I reasoned, to put the drink through its paces, sampling half a dozen or so to discover if the best ones really do challenge champagne. Since one of the two recently opened branches of Proseccheria Mionetto is on the King's Road, where strangers can be counted upon to be at least intermittently alluring, I went west.

It was an evening of grievous disappointment. Mionetto, it emerges, is not the name of an olive-skinned Venetian keen to tantalise London with Adriatic wine, but a large-scale wine producer from Valdobbadiene; these bars are, depressingly, a "branded franchise". By the end of this week, they will have four prosecchi on offer (all made by Mionetto, of course); on the night I called, there was just one. It was OK. Actually it was dead boring. I switched to a red wine called Raso Scuro, which was served far too warm and was rather stringy anyway.

I ate some food: formula bruschetta, on oval sliced bread served on a wooden oval platter. It was a sort of pizza-on-toast. It did for supper, and the whole lot cost me £10.90, but the gastronomic interest of the evening hovered somewhere around zero. The waitress had a cheerful smile to make up for inadequate English, something that the sign in Italian on the door suggested was unlikely to change.

Was this Venice? Patently not. It was open to the King's Road, but ancient number 11 Routemasters and Chelsea mothers in four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers creep by about three feet away, their fumes billowing into the bar, ensuring that anyone with any allure used it to hurry along the narrow pavement as swiftly as possible. Inside, the telly was on, showing some sort of football match: Tor were playing Cag. I was the only non-Italian in the room, and the other half-dozen were slumpy Camel-smoking bar-room sportsmen whose vacancy was entirely directed at the heroes of Tor and Cag. From time to time a passerby in need of sustenance would look in, decide it was just another sports bar, and pass on. Dome, Pizza Express and Bluebird occupy the next three doors up the street, and the competition was winning.

No, London is not yet Venice, and if prosecco and its attendant pleasures are going to take off here, it will need a far more serious and well-researched approach than this. If you like Italian football and ashtrays, on the other hand, drop in.

Wine list scores 0 out of 5.

Proseccheria Mionetto
3 Beauchamp Place, SW3