Muscat de Mireval is a small appellation of SweetGolden natural wines made from the Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains Grape variety. Mireval is a commune in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France. It is located immediately northeast of the highly respected Frontignan appellation. However, its wines rarely receive the same attention as the other natural sweet wines of the region, such as Banyuls and Muscat de Rivesaltes.
The Jurassic soils of this region have a high content of limestone fragments. The commune of Mireval is located just off the coast and has a MediterraneanClimate, which produces the Long, hot summers that Muscat grapes need to develop the most Complex aromas. At their best, the wines have complex, Floral">floral notes, tinged with honey. Muscat de Mireval wines are rare outside of France and production is dominated by a single cooperative.
The largest-ever year for entries, an incredible 18,244 wines were judged at the 2022 Decanter World Wine Awards – with just 163 wines awarded a Platinum medal. ‘Winning a Platinum medal is something really exceptional’ said Decanter World Wine Awards Co-Chair Sarah Jane Evans MW. ‘Platinum is like the stratospheric level’ she commented, ‘so it’s really saying to the winemaker: this is a great wine.’ Making up just 0.87% of the total wines tasted at the 2022 c ...
The focus of the symposium, unsurprisingly, was on the challenges posed by climate change. As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat, the symposium took place during a heatwave, with temperatures of over 40°C in Bordeaux and extreme weather events recorded across the coountry: parts of southwest France saw violent storms and winds of 112kph on the evening of 20 June, while vineyards across the Médoc and St-Emilion were damaged by hailstones ‘the size of golfballs’. As Olivier Bernard of D ...
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
