My sister became diabetic and had to give up her favorite, Asti, but she got some bottles a few years back for xmas from relatives who didn't know her condition. Now I'm wondering if I should toss it or give it to someone. What happens to Asti as it ages? If it's no longer good as a wine, can it be used for cooking or killing snails? :P And where on the label do I find the vintage? I can't deduce a date from the numbers printed on the neck label.
(Fizzy drinks, including sodas, beer, and sparkling wines, don't appeal to me.)
"Asti" is the name of a city in the Piemonte region of Italy. I assume you mean the wine "Asti Spumante," which comes from Asti.
The same thing as happens to all other wines. It gets better for a while, then it gets worse. Although some wines continue to get better for a lot of years, other wines peak extremely early; a wine like most Beaujolais peaks in a matter of months rather than years.
Asti Spumante is another wine that peaks early and doesn't benefit from being held for a while. You don't say anything about how old it is, other than "a few years back," but I would never toss away any wine without tasting it. If it's a few years old, it has probably worsened, but if it's gotten worse because of age, it won't poison you. It just won't taste as good.
So I would taste it first and decide whether to keep it, give it away, or throw it away.
I don't know anything about killing snails, but if any wine doesn't taste good, I wouldn't use it in cooking and ruin the taste of the food.
Two points:
Where on the label a vintage appears depends on the particular wine. There is no place where they all are, so nobody could answer a question like that without knowing the specific wine.
Asti Spumante is very often a non-vintage wine. Personally, I don't particularly like it and don't buy it often, so I'm not sure whether
*any* of it is bottled with a particular vintage. But if the vintage on the bottle is not apparent, almost certainly, what you have is non-vintage wine.
Ken Blake wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
The bottle has "Asti" in large print, but a close reading of the label reveals in tiny print "Spumante" to the left of a logo and "Martini" to the right. Ah, marketing.
Just my surreal sense of humor there. I was obliquely referring to the practice of using beer to kill snails. I figured if it had soured, it might work in dishes where vinegar plus sweetening would be called for.
I like to throw vodka in some sauces, cabernet in others, and cheap merlot in yet others. All from those little "split" bottles, because my consumption is very low volume. Whatever I'm in the mood for. My tastes are pretty vulgar, and I'm not much for telling when a wine "tastes good" by itself. Almost all my alcohol consumption is via sauces, where the alcohol has mostly flashed off from heating. (For my beverage of choice, find me in alt.food.chocolate-milk.:P)
Doesn't the US require dating all food products? So even if it's not labeled as a "vintage" in the wine sense, it might still need some kind of marking (possibly coded) to track when it was produced. These bottles have a computer marking on the neck label that looks like such a lot number.
I'm guessing these were acquired in the 2002-2005 time frame.
At this point I'm inclined to just uncork one and try cooking with it. It's just that 3 bottles would take me years to go through.
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