Moscato d'Asti

Moscato d'Asti is a wine, not a grape. It is made from Moscato Bianco — the variety known internationally as Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains — grown in the hills around Asti and Alba in Piedmont, and it is one of the most precisely engineered wines in Italy despite its reputation for simplicity.

The method is unusual. The juice is chilled to near freezing and held, then fermented slowly and stopped by filtration while a great deal of sugar remains and alcohol has reached only about five per cent. The carbon dioxide retained is modest — this is frizzante, a soft prickle, not the full pressure of a sparkling wine — and the wine is bottled immediately, without lees ageing, because absolutely everything depends on freshness.

What that preserves is the smell of the grape itself: orange blossom, peach, apricot, elderflower, sometimes a musky note that Muscat almost always carries. Moscato is one of the few varieties whose wine genuinely smells like the fruit on the vine, and the entire production process is designed to get that into a bottle without losing it.

It should be drunk young. A Moscato d'Asti two or three years past vintage has lost the point, and unlike most Italian DOCG wines it gains nothing whatsoever from cellaring.

It is not the same thing as Asti, the fully sparkling, drier, higher-alcohol wine made from the same grape in the same place — a distinction that is routinely collapsed and worth keeping. At five per cent alcohol and served very cold with fruit, panettone or nothing at all, Moscato d'Asti is a more serious piece of winemaking than it lets on.