Muscadine is for innovators

Exploring new possibilities for the South's native grape with Erik Martella and Windsor Run Cellars at the Wisdom Table

Despite the name of my Substack, which is a reference to the Noble variety of muscadine, I haven’t written much about the Southeast’s native grape. That’s partly because I have been so preoccupied studying for this damn CSW exam (for any new readers, here’s more info on that). And it’s partly because most North Carolina muscadine wine is made in the eastern part of the state, far from me in Asheville. 

Rest assured, I am no less interested in muscadines, and last weekend I had the pleasure of attending a wine dinner celebrating the release of Erik Martella’s muscadine wines. 

Over six expertly paired courses at The Wisdom Table, Erik shared what he and his winemaking partners, Elizabeth Higley and Kevin Elder at Windsor Run Cellars, have learned from three years of experimenting and exploring what muscadine can do.

It would take more words than Substack allows in a single post to share all of my thoughts on this dinner and the general state of muscadine wine. Instead, I’ve decided to highlight two wines from the night that showcase the team’s innovative thinking. In particular, they offer some ideas for how to address two of the biggest questions I’ve had since I started learning about muscadines:

• How do we deal with muscadines’ low sugar content? 

• How do we balance muscadines’ intense flavor profile? 

How to deal with low sugar content

I’ll start this with a big preface: There is an established sweet style of muscadine wine that deserves more respect than it gets. It’s part of the Southeast’s cultural heritage, and there is a good reason for it. Southerners crave sugar because sweet beverages balance our vinegar-based acidic foods (pulled pork with vinegar sauce, pickled… everything, Texas Pete) and play well with our sweet foods (banana pudding, pecan pie, hummingbird cake). 

That said, I’m a firm believer that dry styles of muscadine wine can find a place on our table, too. As someone who rarely drinks sweet wines, I would love to see it. But it’s a unique grape that presents a few challenges for winemakers attempting to make a high-quality, dry muscadine wine. 

You might assume that grapes mostly used for sweet wine would have more sugar than grapes mostly used for dry wine. In the case of muscadines, you would be wrong. 

Muscadines don’t actually have much natural sugar, and yeast needs to eat sugar to create alcohol. Therefore, winemakers almost always add sugar to muscadine juice before it ferments into wine—a process called chaptalization. Chaptalization gives the yeast enough food to ensure the wine reaches a level of alcohol needed to keep the wine from spoiling. More alcohol also means the wine will have more body, which many wine drinkers like. Oh, and it will have more alcohol, which many wine drinkers also like. 

Those are the reasons to chaptalize, but in the high-falutin’ world of fine wine, chaptalization is generally frowned upon. It’s actually illegal in some regions, like California. 

Why? Well, a large part of wine’s allure is the idea that you’re experiencing the taste of a specific place—terroir, if you will. You lose some of that if you are pushing the wine around with sugar from some unrelated place. 

But chaptalization is much more common in cold places, like Germany, where it is difficult to fully ripen grapes. In these areas, they put value on wines made with the ripest grapes. There is even a system for categorizing grape ripeness that producers put on the label for high-quality wines.

Erik and the Windsor Run team took a page from these cool-climate regions for their Workshop Series Method No. 05-S Carlos 2023 {Press and Ferment; Selective Harvest}.

Rather than using all the grapes from harvest, they picked out only the ripest Carlos grapes (Carlos is a golden/russet muscadine variety, sometimes called Scuppernong). To showcase the result, they presented Workshop No. 5-S side-by-side with a more straightforward wine made without the hand-selection process. Both were good, but the select harvest wine was clearly more refined. The aromas and flavors were still quintessential Carlos, but they were a little more delicate. 

Selecting the ripest grapes reduces the need to chaptalize because you’re working with grapes that have the most sugar possible. It also, of course, increases the production cost and, therefore, the wine price. But that’s fine with me if it tastes better. I can easily envision myself going to a wine shop and buying a bottle of more expensive select harvest muscadine for a dinner party and a bottle of non-select harvest for myself to drink at home. There is a time and a place for both. 

How to balance the intense flavor

I often compare muscadine flavor to melted purple Jolly Rancher. And that’s a scientific comparison, by the way. Artificial grape flavor used in grape candy and soda is made from a compound found in muscadine skins. It’s also in other North American grape species, like Concord.

That’s great for people like me, who grew up begging my friends to give me their purple Skittles, but it can be overpowering and unpleasantly one-note for many palates. 

In fairness to the much-maligned muscadine, the same can be said for many well-known wine grape varieties. Take Gewürztraminer and Muscat, for example. These are two aromatic grapes known for intense floral aromas and flavors. To some extent, these wines have succeeded by accumulating small but devout followings—not unlike muscadine wine. But also winemakers have found broader appeal by balancing their pretty, flowery flavors with some earthy edge.

There are numerous ways to create a complex, balanced wine. Some take place in the vineyard, others in the winery. I’ll focus here on three approaches that work especially well for aromatic wines: blending, bubbling, and bittering. (These are not all real wine terms. I just think it’s cute that they all start with “B”.)

Blending

Plēb Urban Winery makes still and sparkling versions of its Noble Carlos blend of Noble and Carlos muscadine varieties. There is a depth with the blend that you don’t necessarily get with just a Noble or a Carlos.

Bubbling

Botanist and Barrel makes a really nice muscadine pét-nat. The yeast in the bottle gives the wine a funk that balances muscadine’s inherent floral-ness, and the bubbles lighten the wine and add texture. 

Bittering

Erik and the Windsor Run Cellars team took an interesting approach to the third option: adding bitterness. For most wines, the easiest way to bitterness is by allowing the juice to sit with the skins. All red wines spend some time on the skins—that’s where the color comes from. If you allow white wine to sit on the skins for an extended period of time, you get orange wine. 

The skins contain tannins and phenolic compounds. Both of these can come off as bitter, and the tannins also add texture. You can round out the floral and fruity profile of an aromatic grape with texture from tannin and bitterness from the phenolic compounds. 

The issue with following this approach for muscadines is the grape skins are insanely thick and loaded with flavor. You really can’t leave the wine in contact with the skins for long because you’ll just turn the intensity up even higher, rather than balancing it.

Enter: Erik Martella’s Workshop Series Method No. 6 Carlos 2022 {Seed Contact}.

Rather than using the skins and seeds, they pressed the juice, removed the skins and seeds, then added only the seeds back. Why? Grape seeds contain some of the same compounds as the skins, just in smaller amounts. By using only the seeds, they succeed in adding a complimentary flavor note without dialing up the other flavors. 

Commercial winemakers sometimes use seed concentrate powder to add tannin, but I’ve never heard of anyone separating the seeds and reintroducing them to their juice. As far as I know, this is a brand new idea. And this kind of out-of-the-box thinking is what we need to fully understand what muscadines are capable of. Muscadines are so different from other grapes, so it was really cool to see a winemaking team coming up with new ways to work with them.  

Grab your shades

You can’t get anything like muscadine wine anywhere else in the world, and we are only just beginning to understand the full range of this grape species. 

First you have the varieties: While there are hundreds of muscadine varieties, most winemaking has focused on two: Noble and Carlos. What other great winemaking varieties are out there? What blends could we make with them? What if we blend them with other kinds of grapes?

Then there is terroir: We don’t yet know much about how climate and growing conditions influence the flavor profile. If Chardonnay grown in Chablis tastes different than Chardonnay grown 80 miles away in Burgundy, why would we not expect Scuppernong grown in the Yadkin Valley to taste different than Scuppernong from the 400 year old Mother Vine that lives 300+ miles away on the Outer Banks? 

And then winemaking processes and technologies: What if different types of presses or fermentation vessels or aging regimens can unlock more nuanced aromas and flavors?

All of these questions are starting points for further exploration, and more and more winemakers and wine drinkers are giving muscadines the respect they deserve. So, grab your shades. The future of muscadine wine is bright.