Muscat de Hambourg

Identity

Muscat of Hamburg is a table grape that appears in an appellation's specification.

It is a dual-purpose variety, for the table and for the vat, selected in England in the nineteenth century. You meet it on market stalls, in black bunches of large perfumed berries. You also meet it, as an accessory variety, in Palette's permitted grapes.

Its name misplaces it twice: it is neither German nor, strictly, a Muscat in the sense that Muscat à Petits Grains is.

What "dual-purpose" means

It is a category this corpus almost never meets, and it deserves a sentence.

A table grape is selected for berry size, firm flesh, resistance to handling and immediate sweetness. A wine grape is selected for concentration, acidity, the ratio of skin to juice. These are opposing briefs: what makes a good grape to eat generally makes a dilute wine.

Muscat of Hamburg holds both ends, badly but genuinely. Its profile says so: low alcohol, medium body, medium acidity, light tannin. A light, perfumed wine, not one for keeping.

In the vineyard

Early bud burst — so exposed to frost — mid-season ripeness, medium vigour, horizontal to semi-drooping habit. Pl@ntGrape prefers it on soils of medium fertility.

The drooping habit is a table-grape signature: bunches that hang clear are picked by hand without being damaged.

In the glass

Little alcohol, and a frank muscat perfume: that is all that is asked of it, and that is what it gives.

The two descriptors on this entry are readings of that muscat register, not quotations.

In a blend of twenty-four varieties like Palette's, a low-alcohol, strongly perfumed grape plays the same part as Bourboulenc at Bandol: it holds the alcohol down and brings a note the others do not have.

Where it is named

At Palette, an accessory variety, and nowhere else in this corpus.

It is the most unexpected of the twenty-four, and it says something about the appellation: Palette does not only keep rare varieties, it also keeps varieties the usual hierarchy of wine does not consider serious.

What it gets confused with

Muscat à Petits Grains, which is the Muscat of the great wines — Alsace, Beaumes-de-Venise, Rivesaltes. Muscat of Hamburg has the simpler perfume, the larger berry, the lower degree. They never meet in one glass.

Muscat Ottonel, also a nineteenth-century crossing made to carry Muscat elsewhere — but northwards, and for wine alone.