Liqueur Muscats sweet and sticky

THE Muscat grape comes in many guises, possibly best known here in a number of fizzy, Asti Spumantestyle wines from Italy and similar still and fizzy wines from Australia. These tend to be low in alcohol, sweet due to retaining their natural grape sugars and bursting with their fragrant, juicy, grapey characters.

While I wouldn’t go as far as calling Muscat typecast, this penchant for sweetness does seem to suit the variety brilliantly, becoming somewhat of a calling card across a raft of dessertstyle wines, often involving a degree of fortification and extended barrel ageing, or sun drying to reduce moisture content and build concentration. Preferring a warm climate, we see these dessertstyle wines coming from France, Spain, Italy, South Africa and Australia.

One example is the Liqueur Muscat wines that we see from Australia. Technically similar to a type of sherry, the Muscat juice is only briefly fermented before the addition of fortifying spirit kills the yeast, retaining the natural grape sugars. The wine is kept in barrels where it slowly loses volume by evaporation through the wood, becoming deeper brown in colour and ever more concentrated.

When bottling, these wines are often a blend of ages with small portions of very aged material providing concentration and complexity, while younger components add freshness. The very top examples are almost painfully intense, but across the board these are wines where a small glass is normally enough. Thankfully, their extended oxidative maturation in barrel makes these wines incredibly robust, so once opened they can be kept for months (not in my house) without fear.

With their intense flavours of raisins, spices, figs, dates, toffee and caramel these are a dessert in themselves, or can work well with cheeses, nuts, dried figs and the like. Decadent poured over ice cream as well.