Winetasting notes: Muscadine and Mission grape wines

 How does this relate to the blog's topic of justice and sustainability? Because growing native grapes is much easier on the planet than growing Euopean grapes here, which need frequest sprays that can kill off beneficial insects and soil organisms, and they need tractor fuel, to apply those sprays, which pollutes the air. I've written a book on Modern (hybrid) grapes and why more grapegrowers should be growing them: Modern Grapes for the Pacific Northwest. 

I hosted a winetasting that featured Mission wines (see below) and six mostly-award-winning Muscadine wines from a North Carolina winery (made from Noble, Magnolia, and Carlos grapes). My ancestors moved from Scotland to North Carolina and fought the British there in the Rev War, and later they fought the North from Tennessee in the Civil War, and I went to school and met my spouse in Tennessee, and then we lived in Texas, so aside from certain current political issues, I am a South-loving person and I love to try new things, so there's no anti-South wine bias here, at least on my part. This was a vinifera-loving crowd, but they are friends of mine right, so most of them have to be either enthusiastic supporters of modern grape wines, or at least "tolerant" of them. None of us had had any, or many, muscadine wines. The most- common reactions were:

1. The recurrent bouquet/flavor profile (across four whites, a deep rose white/red blend, and a red) is really odd and hard to describe. One woman, who's getting a Masters in winemaking and got a nice scholarship from Wine Spectator, was sure that it was isoamyl acetate (the banana odor), but a Swedish winelover was adamant that it was that weird smell that overripe Concord grapes give off. Another woman thought it was close to the stinkiest kind of lilac flowers, and there might be some truth in that. Another woman was sure it was acetate. I thought it was partly banana, but really no banana smells like this, and then less so it was some Concord smell, but it was about 60% an odor that I can't state, and it wasn't associated with any "common" food or flower, but instead seemed vaguely industrial, or maybe a food additive industrial chemical. And I've been tasting wine for 45 years, much of that professionally. But it wasn't strong like acetate or ammonia or hydrogen sulfide. The wines were clean and well-made, and all of them had this feature, so it was inherent in all these three varieties. What do you Southern Muskie lovers smell in the wines? Please help us understand.

That weird bouquet/flavor was mostly-hidden in the wines that had some residual sugar. All of us concluded that "sweet" was the only good way to make this grape into wine, and given the South's love of "sweet tea," winelovers in the South are probably preconditioned to enjoy sweet wines more so than up here in the PacNW, thereby making them a good fit for this grape if its wine is made sweet. With residual sugar, the wines' fruity flavor profiles really popped. We had a wonderful food spread; it was potluck, and I'll be dieting for days ;), and many foods went great with the sweeter Muscadine wines: cinnamon-sugared walnuts on goat cheese; blue cheese; fried chicken bites; chicken sausage in mustard-paprika-mildly hot pepper sauce; and coffee-chocolate brownies.

The dry muscadine wines didn't have many likers. One man said the Carlos ones tasted like a cider; a woman said no, it's bubble gum (maybe industrial/artificial bubble gum is that flavor I can't quite pin? Like that awful flavor in bubble gum in baseball cards in the 1960s?). The Magnolia wine was the least-liked of them all. The red wine made from Noble got a long essay in a guest's tasting notes: He once lived in Houston and had muscadine vines in his yard, and wrote that this wine had a level of complexity that the others didn't, it was the only wine that reminded him of the muskie fruit "in any way," but he wouldn't drink it again. (He had brought really excellent smoked pulled pork which was good with these wines.)

2. I've been curious about the Mission grape, given its wonderful history. Called the Listan-Prieto grape in La Mancha, Spain, it is not grown there anymore but can still be found in the Canary Islands. Spanish friars took it to Mexico in the 1500s and to TX and NM in the 1600s, and to CA in the 1700s, and until the French finally brought their grapes to the New World in the 1800s, it was the Mission grape that made ALL the wines drunk in North and South America, for centuries! Amazing, that it would now be nearly gone from the US too, but winemakers and chefs in CA are finding it easy to pair with foods, and some winemakers have made it into a bit of a cult favorite that sells out quickly. 

It was hard to find some bottles; we had the '19 and '21 Monte Rio Mission wines, made in CA from Lodi fruit. They were quite popular, though a bit unusual: Color is medium vivid red. Medium-bodied. Sort of a neutral, innocuous flavor profile, but most of us got "not-quite-ripe strawberry" or "strawberry-kiwi." Unusual flavors for a vinifera red, and personally I prefer flavors bolder than this. Enough acid for food, but not too much. I hope more of this grape is planted. Would be happy to drink it anytime, though it's not mind-blowing or anything. Good enough to make me want to walk up to the rail for Communion, if I were Catholic ;)

3. To make sure people had a good time, I opened some vinifera wines, including a 96 point 2017 Les Carmes Haut-Brion Bordeaux. Everyone dutifully said it was good, but I continue to believe that far too many expensive Bordeaux (which I have tried to love for decades) are just not worthy of their high scores or their high prices. For the same money, we can easily find 6 or 8 wonderful bottles of wine that are just as complex, and tastier. I don't know what the major wine critics are smokin', but it must be something really poisonous to their minds. Both critics and winedrinkers are really lost in space with these highly-touted, ugly monsters of a wine. Give me a French wine from a lesser-known region, any day.

I'm planting Hall, Rubicrisp, and Ison muscadines here--all early-ripening ones. I hope I can figure out how to make good wines of them here; if not, they will be good eating!