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.
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 ...
The Roussillon is home to a range of wine styles, at varying price points. Sweet fortified wines (vin doux naturel) used to dominate production, with still dry wines (vin sec) in the minority. In the last 30 years, however, this has completely changed, and vin sec now makes up the majority (80%) of the Roussillon’s output. The recent Wines of Roussillon tasting, held in London, not only highlighted many good quality dry wines being produced, but also cemented the idea that Roussillon whites are ...
Many wine styles can seem perplexing at first: imagine the first bottle of Barolo if you only know Barossa Shiraz, or the first bottle of Jura Savagnin if you were brought up on California Chardonnay. With time, thought and repeated tasting, though, comes understanding. You learn each wine’s syntax and lexicon, its hints and inferences. You grasp the ways in which each style communicates. Its beauty dawns, then grows. Rosé wine sales grew 23% worldwide between 2002 and 2019. Its fuel has come fr ...