Moscatel tasting

I like to be active, not climbing hills or doing press-ups active, but doing something out and about. I'm not keen on work as a substitute. I don't need to paint walls or clean the kitchen, prune trees, shop, cook, clean toilets or keep drains clear to keep myself occupied. We're all a bit work obsessed in my opinion. I did a lot of it at one time, the paid sort, and now I look back on it and wonder why I wasted all that time. The pay, obviously, but that doesn't explain its centrality in British society.

So here I like to get out and about. We go to fiestas, we go to events, we visit castles, we go to the theatre and concerts and the cinema. We see exhibitions, we go to talks and tramp around forests for stargazing and to hunt out scorpions. Some things are never repetitive, even though you've done them before, because each event is different enough to make it potentially memorable. On the other hand there are some things which are so much of a muchness and start to blur into one. Bronze age sites, cathedrals and the like can be very similar unless they evoke some sort of emotional response. Excellent and varied as the Moors and Christians events are, or Fallas or the San Juan hogueras, each time it tends to sameness and repetition. It's got to the point, after twenty years of living here that far too many things provoke a bit of been there, done that sort of feeling. It can be comfortable at times but at others I sometimes wonder why I've dragged us out to watch this or that parade.

I was looking for something fresh, and I came across a wine tasting and town centre visit in Benissa. Now wine tasting is hardly something we've never done before. During several wine tastings in several bodegas, especially when I'm the driver, I've been close to slumping into stage IV sleep. I'm asked to suggest what this or that wine smells of (does it make a wine better that it smells of berries or chocolate?) and to tip the glass so I can suggest where the colour would fit on a standard pantone chart. I've never understood why any colour is better than any other. Maggie is very interested in wine and we have visited a lot of bodegas from La Rioja down to Andalucia. The only difference was that this wine tasting, in Benissa, was of Moscatel. I thought it might be interesting. Unfortunately that was because my knowledge was so flawed as to be useless and I started from the wrong premise.

I thought that Moscatel was sweet wine, a dessert wine. The one that restaurants tend to be hand out as a freebie at the end of a traditional meal in our home province of Alicante. Likewise I thought that the, almost treacly, Mistela, which is sometimes offered instead, was some variety of Moscatel. I was intrigued as as to how anyone could organise a wine tasting around such sweet wines. It's fine, alongside the pudding and perusas at the end of a meal, especially in a very small quantity, but this cata or tasting, promised six different wines. I imagined the participants, overloaded with sugar, behaving very much as Violet Elizabeth Bott always threatened to behave - vomiting that is. It's a fair way up to Benissa but I thought it may be different enough to be memorable.

It turns out that, like Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc or Riesling or Pinot Grigio  - Moscatel is simply the name of a white wine grape. It's white so, unlike our local red grape Monastrell, it can't be used to produce both white and red wines. Moscatel is only good for white. Depending on when the grapes are picked and how they are processed the Moscatel grapes can produce anything from a dry white through to the sweet wine I knew. So there was a much wider range of Moscatels than I knew about. 

The sweet Moscatel is made by only harvesting the grapes right at the end of the season when they have withered to look almost like raisins or sultanas and built up a really high sugar content. The other drink I associated with Moscatel, Mistela, turns out not to be a wine at all but a liqueur. It's made by adding wine alcohol, distilled spirit, to freshly pressed grape Moscatel called grape must or mosto in Spanish. So Mistela is just spiked grape juice. Adding the alcohol stops any fermentation and preserves the sugar in the must which is why it is so sweet.

So it didn't turn out to be that different. We were still invited to comment on what the various wines smelled of and even on their colour. First answer, alcohol, all wines smell of alcohol. I guessed at white as the answer to the second question but the group leader seemed to ignore my comment.

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Just in case you're too young to know what the Violet Elizabeth Bott reference is about she was a character in Richmal Crompton's "Just William" books. Her threat, if William and his friends did not include her in their schemes, was to “scream and scream until I’m sick!”.