Wine · 3.1

Muscadine and scuppernong: this state’s native grape

A separate species from the European vine, with forty chromosomes rather than thirty-eight, native because everything else planted here died.

For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, the Monitask overview offers a concise companion guide.

This state has a native wine grape, which is unusual, and almost nobody outside the southeast has tasted it.

A different species, not a different variety

The European wine grape and the muscadine are separate species. The European vine carries thirty-eight chromosomes and the muscadine forty, which is why crossing them is difficult and why the muscadine sits outside the whole familiar catalogue of varieties.

It grows in loose clusters rather than tight bunches, the berries are large and thick-skinned, and ripe fruit drops individually instead of being cut as a bunch. Harvesting is a matter of shaking rather than snipping.

Why it is here and the European vine is not

The southeast is hot, humid, and home to a bacterial disease spread by insects that kills European vines. Attempts to establish familiar varieties along this coast failed repeatedly for three centuries, and the reason was usually that disease rather than the climate directly.

Muscadine is resistant to it, and to the root pest that destroyed the vineyards of Europe in the nineteenth century. It is native, and it is native because everything else here died.

Scuppernong

The bronze-skinned cultivars of muscadine are called scuppernong, after a river in this state. It is the state fruit, designated in 2001.

A vine on Roanoke Island is claimed to be several centuries old and is described as the oldest cultivated grapevine in the country. The claim is widely repeated and the precise age is not something anybody can establish, which is worth saying while still finding the vine worth visiting.

What it tastes like

Musky and floral, with a distinct aroma that has no analogue in European wine and that people either take to immediately or do not. The skins are thick and tannic and the flesh is soft.

Descriptions reaching for familiar terms tend to fail. It is worth approaching as its own thing rather than as a version of something else.

The state's wine history, briefly

Wine has been made here since the colonial period, and North Carolina is reported to have been the largest wine-producing state in the country before Prohibition, largely on the strength of this grape. Prohibition ended that, and the industry rebuilt slowly through the twentieth century.

The figure is repeated in most accounts of the subject and rests on production records of the period rather than on anything modern, so treat it as the received account rather than as a measurement.

Two wine industries in one state

Along the coastal plain, muscadine, growing where it always has. In the piedmont and the foothills, particularly the Yadkin Valley, European varieties planted since the nineteen-seventies and doing well, because the elevation and the drier air suit them.

A tasting in this state can therefore offer two entirely unrelated kinds of wine, and visitors who assume the second is the real industry and the first a curiosity have it backwards historically.

Why this matters at this festival

Muscadine wines are frequently made sweet, for reasons the next entry covers, and the sugar rule from the first part of this journal says that a sweet wine is the easy partner for chocolate.

So the pairing this festival is built on is not an import. It follows from what grows here, and a sweet scuppernong against a dark bar is a local answer to a general problem.

Trying it properly

Taste it cold, which suppresses some of the muskiness and lets the fruit through. Taste it against something rather than alone, because the aromatics are strong enough to be tiring on their own.

And taste more than one, because the range between producers is wide and a single unfamiliar bottle is a poor basis for an opinion about an entire species.

What else it is used for

Juice, jelly and preserves, in quantity, and the fresh fruit is sold at roadside stands through late summer. A great deal of the crop never becomes wine at all.

The skins and seeds are also sold as a supplement on the strength of their polyphenol content. Claims made for that are outside what this journal will assess, and it is worth knowing that the claims exist and that they are contested.

Growing it

Vines are vigorous, long-lived and trained on wide trellises rather than the tight rows used for European varieties, because the growth habit is different. A single vine covers a great deal of ground.

They need less spraying than vinifera in this climate for the reasons above, which matters to a grower and shows up eventually in what a bottle costs.

The names you will see

Muscadine covers the species. Scuppernong covers the bronze cultivars. Individual cultivar names appear on some bottles and mean something to the grower and generally not to the visitor.

A label saying scuppernong is telling you the colour of the skin rather than the style of the wine, and either can be sweet or dry.

The short version

A separate species, native, resistant to the diseases that killed everything else planted here, and unlike anything a visitor has tasted before. Approach it as its own thing.

Also in this part

• 1.1

  Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight

  The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.

  Read it →
• 1.2

  Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth

  Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.

  Read it →

For further context, see NC State muscadine resources.