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The Bellini Was Built on White Peaches, Prosecco and Venetian Summer

At Harry's Bar, the Bellini is still made from white peaches and Prosecco, even if exactly when Giuseppe Cipriani first combined them—and how Giovanni Bellini gave the drink its name—has never been firmly settled.

Before the Bellini became premixed slush poured from a carton at a nondescript hotel brunch, Harry’s Bar assigned one employee almost entirely to peaches each Venetian summer. From June through September, he cut and pitted small white peaches, squeezed them by hand, then pushed the juice and pulp through a fine conical sieve. Mixed with very cold Prosecco, the pale rose purée filled a small tumbler beneath a cap of foam. The recipe had two ingredients and a four-month season, but its birthday proved less tidy.

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Harry’s Bar began with an improbable loan. According to the family account, Giuseppe Cipriani was tending bar at Venice’s Hotel Europa in the late 1920s when a young American guest named Harry Pickering became stranded without money. Cipriani lent him enough to get home. Pickering returned with the debt and additional capital for a bar, which opened under his first name in 1931. The 15-by-30-foot former rope store sat on a dead end near Piazza San Marco, where its privacy attracted an international crowd. Ernest Hemingway became a regular and used it as a setting in Across the River and Into the Trees, although the surviving record supports his punishingly dry Montgomery........

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