Drink - Victoria Moore recommends a late summer breeze of a wine
The dog days of summer are just the time to enjoy the increasingly fashionable dry white wine made from the muscat grape. The August sunlight thickens, yellows and lowers its slant; a faint tang of autumnal smokiness can just about be picked up on the air. And a glass of dry muscat has a light, floral, dewy garden fragrance (I hope this doesn't sound too much like a perfume advert; it really is good to drink) that scythes through the vegetal heaviness of the season.
While I'm on the theme of gardens in full bloom, I'll also note that Pliny the Elder described the muscat grape as "uva apiana" - grape of the bees - because the grape's heady perfume attracted bees (and also flies, but that's a less romantic image). The French, on the other hand, describe the smell as "musque", literally "musked", which recollects humid, pollen-filled summer nights. In fact, dry muscat is a late summer breeze of a drink - crisp, fresh and aromatic. It has the sort of flavour that your taste buds will be quick to make friends with because, although not desperately sophisticated, dry muscat is to be blessed for its easygoing nature. It will not bludgeon your taste buds with one insistent keynote (as did the vanilla oakiness of the New World Chardonnay we all took to our bosom for a brief period). Nor will it expect you to pay it your undivided attention, thank heaven. Just pour it, nicely chilled, into your glass, and be surprised by how quickly it slips down the throat.
The vine likes heat and is very at home around the Mediterranean (it is called moscato in Italy; moscatel in Spain and Portugal), where it is harvested in September or October. And it is also particularly appropriate to be drinking muscat as we approach harvest time, because of all the grape varieties in the world, from Cabernet Sauvignon (the grand-daddy of the reds) to noble Riesling to ubiquitous Chardonnay, muscat is the only one to produce wines that actually smell and taste of the thing they are made from - grapes. Given that wines are variously described as smelling of geraniums, violets, horse leather, petrol and goodness knows what else, that's some achievement. You may have tried muscat before. If so, you most probably know it for its delicious, golden dessert wines - Muscat de Rivesaltes and Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise are two of the most famous.
Some of these fortified wines can be a little heavy, dripping with blossomy sweetness like a nectar of the gods. I think that this association puts some people off the dry version. Perhaps it is because, as a nation, we have never quite recovered from the sickly Liebfraumilch that we were fed in the 1970s. We now like our white wine to be bone dry. Indeed, most people will not buy a white wine unless it has, as far as their knowledge of wine goes, a 100 per cent pure pedigree for dryness. Well, have some patience, because dry muscat really is dry. And here's another incentive. It tends to come at a very reasonable price. I've tasted a handful of the versions offered by major supermarkets, all around the £4-£5 mark. If pushed to plug one in particular, I'd say go for the Muscat Sec 1999 Domaine de la Provenquiere (Waitrose, £3.99). But what stood out most was a remarkable consistency of quality and, in some cases, flavour. I'd almost venture to say that you can't go wrong with it. You might consider that this makes dry muscat a not very exciting buy - but how great is it to find a new, reliable wine to lob into the supermarket trolley?
I tried to tell my parents - who wouldn't dream of spending more than a fiver on a bottle of wine apart from at Christmas (and even then, only if I held them in Oddbins at gunpoint) - about it, but they were on the case already. Their second case, in fact.
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