Moscato – The last straw!

Right, that’s it, I’ve had enough. Two weeks ago, The Observer newspaper featured an article about Moscato d’Asti, accompanied by the now ubiquitous photo of a hip hop star. Rappers, and Drake in particular, have been rhyming about Moscato of late and this seems to have sent the wine press into a frenzy, hoping that by opening their article with a photo of Jay-Z or Kanye West that it’ll open the door to a new, cool readership base. The Observer actually managed to name six hip hop stars in their piece, a new record for the articles I’ve read, but still some way short of the average number of guest appearances on a DJ Khaled track.

Sales of Moscato are on the rise too, so I can see why people want to write about this subject, but it’s very easy to spot the witty, tongue in cheek articles which I enjoy reading (see Bubble Brothers Blog on the subject from Grapes of Sloth’s Paul Kiernan), from the ones that are only paying lip service to the topic. Last time I checked, every article about the newest Bentley or Lamborghini didn’t lead with a line about how ‘Rick Ross drives one of these in his new video’ or ‘Akon has one of these in orange’, so why does the wine press have to? Amongst all the tweets about the music choices at the International Wine Challenge in Lord’s last week, I didn’t see any about Young Jeezy or Lil’ Wayne, so I’m assuming there hasn’t been a meteoric rise in hip hop’s popularity in the wine world and that Gucci Mane wasn’t being played on the stereo while Tim and Oz tasted another flight of Piemontese delights.

At any rate, the link between hip hop and wine is old news. If you want to see true critical wine observation, get yourself onto YouTube and find the Nas video “Hate Me Now”, fast forward to about 3 mins 20 seconds in and you’ll see that noted wine critic Sean Combs (aka Puff Daddy, P.Diddy, friend of Notorious B.I.G.) spitting out a mouthful of Louis Roederer Cristal. Ostensibly this is because he’s “got millions of times your salary”, but I reckon that’s all a front and he just didn’t like the vibrant acidity; well that or perhaps he, Busta Rhymes, Pharrell and Jamie Foxx actually do prefer Courvoisier.

See, I managed to name check 15 rappers with ease – beat that Observer!

Oh right…the wine…I’m extremely partial to a glass of the perfumed Moscato d’Asti from Oddero with its heady peach and elderflower aromas. Doesn’t sound very hip hop now, does it?

(Image from http://www.oddero.it)

Edit: The Vevo YouTube police won’t let me embed the video to this post but at least know you have a one click link below to Cristal spitting! Don’t hate on me.