Out Of The Bottle

With David Ellis

Brown Brothers Sparkling Moscato & Adelaide Hills' Petaluma

A decade ago Moscato was a little-known, relatively alternative wine style in this country, but it’s enjoyed somewhat of a stellar rise since then – with Victoria’s Brown Brothers leading the charge, and now accounting for an amazing 49% of all Moscato sold in this country.

And not content to leave it at that, they’ve now released their first-ever Sparkling Moscato under the stewardship of winemaker Cate Looney, who has been making Moscato for the past half-decade.

“The Brown family is renowned for pushing the envelope with new product development, and we (the winemaking team) were delighted when they challenged us to see where we could take Moscato next,” she says.

What the team came up with is a sparkling wine made from Muscat of Alexandria grapes (the Romans found this grape’s distinctive aroma was akin to musk, so dubbed it Moscato meaning “smelling of musk,”) and which has a sherbet-like perfume and lifted aromas of citrus and freshly-crushed grapes that follow through on the palate.

A delightful bubbly at just $16.50, Cate suggests you take a bottle or two along to your favourite Asian restaurant and enjoy with a spicy lemongrass, coriander and chilli-infused Asian broth.

One For Lunch

The Adelaide Hills’ Petaluma uses fruit from it’s B&V vineyard on the eastern escarpment of Mount Barker for it’s Bridgewater Mill Shiraz, a wine of somewhat power and elegance as a result of the work that went into selecting just the right site for its B&V vineyard in the early 1990s.

Fruit was hand-picked for the just-released 2009 Shiraz that’s a wine having ripe, fresh blackberry and lifted plum characters, and spicy white pepper on the palate; at $22 it’s a nice drop to serve with home-made Osso Bucco.

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