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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
