Sip moscato
Fizzy, frothy and pleasantly sweet, it’s no surprise that this particular wine has skyrocketed in popularity. Soon, there'll be a slice of it for everyone.Beloved by many, hated by few, and misunderstood by most, moscato is certainly one of the most talked-about wines on the market. Riboli may be on to something: There is nothing wrong with sweet potato pie. Moscato drinkers are loyal to their brand - so loyal that beverage makers are flooding the market with various moscato spin-offs. If you Google "moscato," very soon you'll find blog entries decrying the drink as "ghetto." As much as moscato fans like the drink, there's a certain snobbery that dismisses it altogether.īut people who like moscato really don't care. Over the course of my interviews for this story, a handful of wine experts wouldn't even be interviewed for the story. You know, liking pumpkin pie or sweet potato pie, what's wrong with that?" "I think we as an industry have been trying so hard to make everybody like dry wine for the last 50 years. Steve Riboli, vice president of San Antonio Winery, says that if moscato fans' tastes never change, that's fine.
The thought is, if you start out with moscato, at some point, your palate will mature and you'll start drinking other, more expensive wines - from those same winemakers.Īrnold predicts that even the rapper Drake's taste might change over time: "If we could build a time machine and go listen to a Drake song three, four years from now, I would be willing to bet you that he's long since moved on from moscato and he's singing to his girlfriend about Napa cabernet or burgundy or something like that." "What you're seeing here is a wine company realizing that they can use moscato to turn people on to the other products that they sell," Arnold says. It's kind of an odd pairing, until you think about the strategy at work.Įric Arnold, an editor at and author of the book First Big Crush, says the ad isn't just about bringing in new people, but about taking them somewhere else. It advertises Bartenura as the official moscato of the Dodgers.
If you live in Los Angeles, you might have seen a billboard for Bartenura moscato. And a lot of them are pretty new to this: Moscato is their gateway wine.Īnd the dealers have latched on - they're reaching out everywhere. The wine drinkers are young they're Latino, or black or Asian. All of the women in the group - and many of the people in the winery - were drinking wines like moscato. She was at the winery with a group of girlfriends - all black - celebrating one of their birthdays. Scorza first sampled moscato while she was working at an Olive Garden restaurant. People who don't think of themselves as wine drinkers, who are intimidated by the idea of a wine tasting, who would never, ever try to search out "earthy tones" in a deep red - those people drink moscato, and they like it.Īt the San Antonio Winery in Los Angeles one sunny Sunday afternoon, I found dozens of these moscato wine converts, like Quintasha Scorza. Sweet enough and weak enough, in fact, to make a wine drinker out of anyone, which is why winemakers love it so much. Some of the very best bottles can cost less than $50.Īnd moscato is really sweet and has low alcohol content. That would leave the perfect opening for a sweet drink like moscato to step into the hip-hop scene, no?īut despite moscato's popularity, the strange thing about hip-hop's fascination with the beverage is that the wine is not at all high-end: It's a relatively cheap white wine made from the muscat grape. "Much more Hispanic, much younger, much lower-income, much more female."īrager says African-Americans are three times more likely to drink moscato than some other table wine. "Much more African-American," says Brager. Sales of moscato will keep growing, he says, at about 25 percent a year.īut almost all of the big press about moscato and its newfound fame seem to forget one thing about the wine and its consumers: race.īrager says one would typically describe the average wine drinker as older, white and upper-income, and they are equally split by gender. According to Brager, the number of moscato brands has doubled in the past three years - and it's not over yet.
#Sip moscato tv
Nielsen doesn't just track TV Brager's group follows retail wine sales. "Frankly, I haven't seen anything like it at all." "I've been following the wine category for over 10 years," says Danny Brager, the senior vice president of beverage/alcohol practice at Nielsen. The wine of the moment - well, the past few years, actually - has been moscato. Nicki Minaj is part owner of the coconut moscato brand MYX.