The Oldest Sweet Wine For Beginners: Muscat

Here is a great sweet wine for beginners: Muscat! It comes in six varieties and is the oldest living variety of grape in the world. There are somewhere around 200 mutations of Muscat known to exist. You can find grapes varying across the color spectrum from white to nearly black and every one of them has a yummy, sweet aroma.

Let's look at the different varieties of Muscat wine found around the world:

• Muscat Blanc á Petit Grains is most widely used in Spumante, which means sparkling in Italian. It varies in color from white to pink to dark reddish-brown. You might be familiar with Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante


• Moscato Giallo means yellow Muscat. It too is used for spumantes and can be found as Goldmuskateller or Moscato Rosa and is best known for making the fragrant sweet Muscat wines from Italy's Alto Adige region


• Muscat Hamburg is a dark-colored variety used mainly as a table grape but also produces red wines like Malbec that are consumed in the countries of Eastern Europe.


• Muscat of Alexandria is very old and dates back to the time of pharaohs. It is a high-yield Muscat wine grape with have low acid and high sugar content, which generally produces low-quality wines with raisiny characteristics and is usually made into heavy, sweet, golden- to dark-brown liqueurs and sherry


• Muscat Ottonel thrives in cooler climates and is best known in the dry, perfumy wines of Alsace and rich dessert wines in Austria.


• Orange Muscat wine has a distinctive orange flavor and is used mostly in California dessert wines.

Because there are so many varieties of Muscat wine, aromas and flavors vary from region to region. There colors are also vastly different and their names do not always characterize this, as Muscat Blanc, or white Muscat, is not always white but is still a great sweet wine for beginners.

The Muscat grape thrives in the temperate climes of California, southern Europe and the Mediterranean wine regions. It is a late-harvest grape. This is responsible for the sweetness found in Muscat wines.

Chilean Muscat is used to produce table wines as they are to a smaller degree in Italy and California. New York state produces the Muscat Ottonel around the Finger Lake region.
Sparklings, or spumantes, are the main product of Muscat grapes in Italy.

For spumantes the grapes are crushed then chilled. As they warm they ferment to the appropriate alcohol level then sealed in large tanks to trap the CO2. Careful attention is paid to the fermentation process so that it is stopped once the wine achieves the right levels of sugar and alcohol. At this time it is chilled, bottled and allowed to age in the bottle.

The inexpensive bulk Muscat wines in the United States come from Orange Muscat and Black Muscat grapes grown by only one winery in Stanislaus County in California. Napa Valley produces a fortified wine called Muscat de Beaulieu. It is also used as a blending agent in producing the popular Conundrum wine and in an ice wine called Vin de Glaciere.

There's a peak into the sweet wines of Muscat. I hope you are fortunate enough to find one of them in your local wine shop. As a sweet wine for beginners, Muscat wine is one of the great ways to start.