We live in North Carolina, a region not internationally known for its wines. Aside from the Western Carolina mountains, home to the Biltmore House Winery in Asheville, our state is notably lacking in the kind of flinty, slaty, gravelly, stony soil for which, as Backyard Homestead author Carleen Madigan puts it, grapes tend to “have an affection.” What we have here, mostly, is red clay, decent for tobacco-growing; vineyards, not so much.
In our bosky Southern climate, however, one strain of grapes does flourish. Every farmer’s market here features, in the autumn, heavy glowing bunches of muscadine grapes: small, dark, more tart than the red table grapes from the supermarket. Ew, said our children, when I brought some home. We quickly learned that if, when you pop one into your mouth, what you’re expecting is the sweet pallid grape taste you’ve always known, you’re apt to find the muscadine — literally — a bitter disappointment.
When someone brought us a bottle of the local wine, though it’s anything but bitter, we found the same thing to be true. If what you expect is merlot, your first mouthful of muscadine wine might make you say Ew, too. It’s far more straightforwardly grape-y than what we’ve come to be used to in wine, like children’s grape juice, albeit with an 11% alcohol kick. It’s not the wine you’d drink with your red pasta sauce, or pour into it while it’s cooking. The standard wine categories — white with fish and chicken, red with beef — don’t exactly work with muscadine wine. And so it’s easy, after a few experimental sips, to dismiss it as a novelty, a weird Southern thang like the Moon Pie, which no serious person would consume on purpose.
Of course, for centuries people have been brewing homemade wine with whatever ingredients were growing close at hand: dandelions, for example, as well as indigenous wild grapes like the muscadine, whose family includes another familiar home-wine variety, the scuppernong. Southern families used to be thronged with maiden great-aunts who brought out their bottles of scuppernong for Thanksgiving and Christmas, or who offered it medicinally whenever anyone complained of an ache or a pain.
As recent research has shown, those great-aunts had it right. The muscadine has been revealed as a super-food, delivering a powerful dose of antioxidants with every serving. As Larry Cagle, owner of the WoodMill Winery in Vale, North Carolina, told my husband on a recent visit, a glass of muscadine wine contains the same level of antioxidants as forty glasses of merlot. The muscadine, says the winery’s website, produces high levels of the antioxidant Resveratrol, and has been “deemed nature’s healthiest grape.”
My husband, who has suffered for years with lower back pain and stiffness, promptly bought a bottle, and claims that since he has begun drinking a glass every night, he wakes up pain-free. The placebo effect? Maybe it is; on the other hand, those grape-picking, wine-making great-aunts of yore were pretty limber.
But, you say, I like my two heart-healthy glasses of red wine with dinner. I like it because it tastes like wine. Muscadine wine tastes like grape-flavored medicine.
Well, that’s true, at least on a relative scale. With the rise of a sophisticated wine-drinking culture in America, we’ve learned to think in terms of the wine dinner, pairing a wine with every course of gourmet food. Muscadine wines derive from a different culture, the Southern culture of, as Larry Cagle says, “front-porch sippin’.” They are best served chilled, even over ice. You might even try mixing them with sparkling water, for a refreshing spritzer, or substituting muscadine wine for a fruit juice in a punch recipe, for a spiked treat. I haven’t attempted mulling it, as you’d mull a Paisano wine, for example, heating it with orange juice and spices like cinnamon and clove; that’s another experiment to try. A muscadine wine would also pair well with a meat like pork, goose, or duck, which you’d serve with apples, oranges, cranberries, or another fruity accompaniment. We are having goose for Christmas dinner, and muscadine wine will grace our table as well.
