A carefree Italian way to toast Mom

Jon Bonné Lifestyle editor • Profile

For better or worse, Mother’s Day is a brunch holiday. And brunch is a bit of a bastard child when it comes to drinks — occasionally granted rights to a Bloody Mary or Mimosa, but almost never wine.

That makes perfect sense. It’s not just that eggs and French toast are poor matches for most wines, it’s that a Sunday morning, sitting with your mother, isn’t really prime time for wine.

There are options, though. Last year I suggested moscato d’Asti as a refreshing low-alcohol companion to all those plates of waffles and omelets. This year, hoping to put theory into practice, I enlisted some expert help.

So I dropped my mother Bette an e-mail. “I'm planning my Mother's Day wine column and I'd like you to help me taste through the wines,” I said. “Are you game?”

“I'm more than game — actually thrilled,” she wrote back.

We set a date.

With the wines lined up, the first order of business was to remind Mom — and my father, who joined us as an honorary taster — of the differences between moscato d’Asti and Asti spumante, its better known, cheaply made cousin. The spumante version is now generally just called Asti.

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Both hail from around the city of Asti, in Italy's Piedmont region, and both are made from the moscato bianco grape, known elsewhere as white muscat, or as muscat blanc à petits grains, which goes into the sweet wines of Beaumes de Venise.

But moscato d’Asti is crafted from superior grapes. Its fermentation is stopped earlier in the process, leaving more sugar and less alcohol in the wine. As such, moscato d’Asti generally lands between 5.5 and 7 percent alcohol, about half the level of a typical wine, versus 7 and 9.5 percent for run-of-the-mill Asti.

And though spumante also has about 3-4 atmospheres pressure in the bottle, lower than most Champagne, it's still far more bubbly than moscato d'Asti, which is bottled at sea-level pressure. It is made in a frizzante, or semi-sparkling style. Hence why you’ll find it sealed with a slightly modified standard cork, not the bell-shaped closures found in Champagne, and you’ll need a corkscrew to open it.

Despite having more sugar, good moscato often tastes less sweet than its counterpart, either because of greater acidity and better structure, or because most are made by small producers. By comparison, standard Asti is made almost exclusively by large companies, like Martini and Rossi. Spumante’s leisure-suit reputation hasn’t shrunk its market share: It accounts for 25 times as much of the region’s output as moscato d’Asti.

As for Mom, she not only loves bubbly, but has the sort of unabashed fondness for sweet wines that wine snoots love to dis — probably because they’re trying to distance themselves from their own pink zinfandel roots. So … perfect person to taste with, right?

Sort of. Though moscato has long had a winking reputation as a perfect “breakfast wine,” we found several too sweet to serve with even dessert, much less to pair with a sunny Sunday brunch.

Lean and less sweet
The best were on the lean side, with sweetness almost an afterthought. They offered bright acidity, citrus overtones and a white mineral character to balance out the nectar aromas, like white peach, that typify moscato. That minerality, points out Sergio Esposito, managing partner of Italian Wine Merchants in New York, is often found in moscato made from older vines grown on limestone- and chalk-heavy soil. A stony edge was present in the best of the wines we tasted, adding an overtone that transforms straightforward moscato into something more complex and curious.

This leaner style of moscato d’Asti also improves its versatility. Though the sweetness might suggest otherwise, moscato's true virtue lies not at the end of the meal but before you sit down. 

The palate-cleansing freshness, along with the low alcohol, make it a favorite as an aperitif or a meal-starter. Though a friendly wine, it can clash with many foods; the pairings that work best are often post-meal nibbles: a bit of fresh fruit, a dollop of mascarpone, a plate of biscotti.

That might explain a popular Italian tradition — to greet guests at the door with a glass of moscato in hand. Even nondrinkers often can't resist, Esposito says. “You don’t ask people if they want a glass of moscato d’Asti. You just pour it for them.”

So perhaps moscato d’Asti works best as a prelude to those tried-and-true Mother’s Day brunches, a cheery reminder to Mom that you haven’t forgotten her special day.

My own mother, however, is a tough crowd to please. “Between this and Champagne,” she quipped as we sipped our final glass, “I’d take the Champagne.”

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