How the politics of prosecco explain what took the fizz out of the Democrats | Mark Blyth

Joe Manchin torpedoed his party's key bill for the same reason Italy protected the sparkling wine - the local growth model

If you get a bad taste in your mouth when you hear the name Joe Manchin - the fossil fuel industry-backed senator from West Virginia who torpedoed his own party's Build Back Better" bill just before Christmas - you might want to reach for a glass of something to wash it away.

Given that it's New Year's Eve, there's a reasonable chance you're guzzling a glass of prosecco, which now accounts for just under half of all bubbly drunk globally. While this may take the taste away momentarily, there's also an odd thing about prosecco I want you to consider. How that glass of Italian bubbly came to be in your hand gives us a window into understanding how a Democratic senator can derail a multitrillion dollar climate-focused national programme that promised huge amounts of money for his own state.

Mark Blyth is a political economist at Brown University