Muscat de Saint-Jean-de-Minervois is a Sweet, fortified, natural wine appellation from the Languedoc wine region in Southern France. The wines are based on the Muscat Blanc a Petits Grains Grape variety. Muscat de Saint-Jean-de-Minervois wines are produced using a traditional sweet winemaking process called Mutage, which involves adding Alcohol to the grape must to prematurely stop the Yeast">yeast and thus the Fermentation process. They generally have a residual sugar content of about 125 grams per litre and an alcohol content of about 15%.
They are among the most Expressive of the Muscats du Languedoc, with sweet, honeyed aromas of citrus and Central-ranges/orange">Orange blossom. The appellation takes its name from Saint-Jean-de-Minervois, a village at the southern end of the Massif Central, the low mountain range of south-central France. It dominates the vineyards of the very different Minervois appellation to the south. Because of the slightly higher altitude (200 metres), the climate is cooler than in many other wine regions of the Languedoc, allowing the Muscat grapes to stay on the vine longer.
At the 2021 Decanter World Wine Awards, the world’s largest wine competition saw its biggest year to date, with 18,094 wines tasted from 56 countries. Over 15 consecutive days in June 2021, almost 170 expert wine judges, including 44 Masters of Wine and 11 Master Sommeliers, awarded 50 Best in Show, 179 Platinum, 635 Gold, 5,607 Silver and 8,332 Bronze medals. Join Decanter at our Fine Wine Encounter NYC this June, where you will have the opportunity to sample 23 of these top awarded Gold, Plati ...
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 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 ...
