They call it the winemaker's breakfast wine: five degrees of alcohol, a gentle frizzante, and Muscat's perfume intact. The sweetness is not an addition but the grape itself — fermentation in tank is chilled and interrupted before the sugar is spent, leaving unfermented grape at the heart of the wine and only a soft press of bubbles.
The Muscat tradition of the Asti hills is documented at least since the sixteenth century; Giovanni Battista Croce, jeweller to the House of Savoy, described its making in his treatise of 1606. Where the fully sparkling Asti went industrial, Moscato d'Asti stayed closer to the farmhouse — peach, orange blossom and sage in a wine picked early and drunk young, the Piedmontese answer to the end of a meal.