Muscat grapes and wines

Muscat, moscato - what does it all mean? For years I have known that a muskat wine is a sweet dessert wine, which appears on the dessert menu in restaurants. 

Today for the first time I had muscat grapes, which you can see on the right of the picture. The muscat grapes which you eat as dessert grapes are not the natural little grapes which are used to make wine. People eating grapes one by one want a big grape which is easy to peel and gives you a proper mouthful. Do you remember 'Peel me a grape' said by humorous American actress what's her name? If she had been eating tiny grapes they would have taken forever to peel. 

So muscat grapes grown for eating are bred and picked with the largest ones chosen for the desert table. If you grow ornamental vines in your garden (as we can in London, England), you have to choose between tiny grapes suitable for wine making only, or bigger grapes suitable for eating only, or maybe a rarer grape which is suitable for both.

Bear in mind that grapes for eating must be sweet or at least neutral in flavour. Grapes for wine making can be small and sour. If you picked them early in the season they would be sharp and sour, like unripe apples and most fruit. You wait until the end of the summer to harvest them, giving them all the summer in the sunshine to grow larger and slightly sweeter with a stronger flavour. 

The sweeter wines are made with grapes left so long that they are growing a mould. 

So far, so good, easy for anybody to understand. To complicate matter further, in each country the name muscat is given to a different grape, either different entirely from the start or developed differently by breeding over the years. That's why the country of origin and even the village, vineyard growing the grapes, and the winery turning the grapes into wine is important. 

In the picture you can see the glass of Beaune de Venise, my favourite muscat dessert wine. Beside it are the muscat grapes. However, I must tell you that compared to the delicious sweet wine, the grapes seemed disappointingly bland and flavourless. Maybe that's what makes a special wine. Or maybe that's why muskat is a grape rarely found in supermarkets. Or maybe the pairing of the two just doesn't work. It intensified the sweetness of the wine but also the blandness of the grape.

Similar effects were found when I tried to match blue cheese with Beaune de Venise. The effect of the sweet wine masked any flavour in the cheese. The wine seemed no longer deliciously sweet but ridiculously sweet, unnecessarily sweet, over sweet, cloying.

Now I know why you pair sweet wines with sweets or desserts. 

As you can see from the picture the spelling is m u s c at but the spell checker keeps changing it to 

m u s k e t .

Angela Lansbury, BA Hons, ACG, CL, travel writer and photographer, blogger, author and speaker.