NPR Be Like "Black People Be Like 'I Love Moscato'"
NPR featured a weird (or, as some who love Moscato might say, "wiggity wiggity wack") story Thursday about how black people love Moscato. The article, titled "Moscato: The Gateway Wine For People Of Color?," was produced by NPR's Code Switch blog ["news from frontiers of race, ethnicity and culture"]: The Gateway NPR For People of Color.
According to NPR, the main reasons black people like Moscato are that Moscato is sweet, cheap, and rap-approved. [Full disclosure: I am half-black and zero-caring about Moscato.]
Online, the story was illustrated with a promotional image of Nicki Minaj endorsing a coconut Moscato.
Moscato: The Gateway Wine For People Of Color? http://t.co/8SjiZeaQEw
— NPR News (@nprnews) June 27, 2013
Black people be like: "What is the wine that Nicki Minaj drinks? I will have that."
The copy described Moscato as "a wine for the uninitiated," noting it is "sweet enough and weak enough, in fact, to make a wine drinker out of anyone...."
"People who don't think of themselves as wine-drinkers, who are intimated 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."
Black people be like: "Wine is too hard. But I can understand Moscato."
According to NPR, one black person who loves Moscato is Drake. He even rapped a rap about it in 2009. (It's a celebration — clap clap bravo. Lobster and shrimp and a glass of Moscato.) Eric Arnold, an editor at TastingRoom.com, suggested that in time even blacks with unsophisticated palates like Drake could find their tastes maturing from black-friendly Moscato to fancier wines favored by whites.
Arnold predicts even the rapper Drake's taste might change over time: "If we could build a time machine and you know, listen to a Drake song three or four years from now ... I'd be willing to bet you he's moved on from Moscato and he's singing to his girlfriend about Napa cabernet or burgundy or something like that."
Black people be like: "This is truly an historic day, for we have finally developed the technology to facilitate travel across dimensions and through time. Let's go to 2017 and listen to Drake songs so we know what dranks to drink."
Unfortunately, not everyone is as ready to jump onto the "white people dance like this, black people dance like this; white people be like, 'I'll have a glass of the 1998 Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame,' black people be like, 'MOZZCATOOOOOOOO'" train as NPR. Some experts declined to be interviewed for the piece.
Over the course of my interviews for this story, a handful of wine experts wouldn't even be interviewed for the story. 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.
Wine experts be like: "I don't want to be like 'Black people love Moscato.' That's racist."