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.
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 ...
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