One of the pleasures of visiting France is that there one can walk into any supermarket and buy fruit that is both tasty and ripe. This is in marked contrast to shopping in Britain, where the main retail chains seem to make it a point of principle to stock only the varieties with the least flavour and to sell them so under-ripe that any potential for flavour will have no chance to reach fruition. Anyone who has only ever eaten fruit bought from British supermarkets can have no notion of how good it can actually taste. Indeed, they will probably have grown up under the illusion that fruit is essentially tasteless.

Of no fruit is this truer than the grape. I am just back from a short visit to France where I have been enjoying grapes of the muscat variety, which are universally on sale there at this time of year. Admittedly, they tend to cost slightly more than other grapes – of which a wide range of types, far wider than in Britain and mostly tastier, are also available over there – but then muscats are the tastiest of all.

The Muscat Grape…

…comes in many sub-species, and in all shades of colours from greenish off-white to purplish off-black. The whiter varieties are widely grown, usually in order to be fermented and/or fortified into dessert wines, and tongue-tingling nectars some of these can be. Just up the road from where I was staying in France is the vineyard town of Beaumes-de-Venise, and if you have drunk Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise you will be familiar with its characteristic flavour: aromatic with a subtle sweetness that lingers but doesn’t cloy. Under names like Moscato and Muscatel, similar wines are produced throughout southern Europe, in California and in Australia, and if you like a sweet wine with your pud, or simply on its own, they are well worth a try. Makers of some sparkling wines also include muscat grapes in the blend to add their piquancy to the flavour.

When it comes to eating, though, it is mainly the almost-black variety that is used. This is known as Muscat Noir, Moscato di Ambergo or Muscat Hamburg depending where it is grown, which is mostly in France, Italy and Australia. It seems unlikely it was ever grown as far north as Hamburg, irrespective of the name, though with the aid of global warming that may well become possible in the future.

Appearance

Muscat noir grapes are individually small, and tend to come in tightly-packed bunches of uneven size, each grape measuring anything from two centimetres down to half a centimetre in diameter. I suspect that this in itself doesn’t endear them to the buyers for British retailers, who seem to have an obsessive, almost militaristic, bias in favour of uniformity of size and shininess in the fruit they put on the shelves. What’s more, from a biased viewpoint of this kind, it gets worse. Muscat grapes are seldom shiny – indeed, they tend to have a dusty bloom on them, which is natural and perfectly healthy – and in any bunch you generally find a few grapes that are not just small but actually shrivelled. This doesn’t do much harm; they are usually still edible and have a pleasingly

intensified raisin-like flavour. But it’s probably anathema to those who judge fruit is by appearance rather than taste.

Seeds and skin

Superficially, it gets worse still. By the standards of most table grapes, muscats have rather thick, chewy skins. When you encounter one of the tougher examples, this does present a problem. If chewed too thoroughly, the skin releases a tannic aftertaste quite at odds with the sweetness of the flesh of the fruit, so, faced with a tough one, you want to either swallow the skin quickly or spit it out. Early swallowing, however, is often rendered impractical if you don’t also want to ingest the pips, of which most muscats contain at least three or four, and using tongue and teeth alone it’s difficult to disentangle the two.

In these circumstances, the preferred, even if somewhat undignified, mode of eating is: (i) a quick preliminary nibble or two to break the skin and separate it from the flesh; (ii) the hoiking out of the skin from mouth with the aid of fingers; (iii) a good chew to enjoy and absorb the flesh of the grape; (iv) the spitting out of the residual pips. You need a certain aplomb to accomplish all this in public without feeling just a wee bit self-conscious, but with practice you’ll find it comes quite comfortably. Whether for reasons of appetite or etiquette, many people prefer to swallow the seeds, and I salute their bravery, since I have always understand that to do so risks appendicitis. Myself, I prefer to err on the side of cautious disgorgement.


Taste

Help. How does one describe a flavour, especially one that is complex and subtle? One reason I don’t write more food reviews is that, foodie though I am, I don’t know how. But here goes. Biting into a muscat grape, the first thing you notice is its intensity: the distinctive flavour fills the mouth, in contrast to the insipid anonymity of the staple British supermarket grape, which barely seems to engage the tongue at all.

Distinctive in what way, you ask. Sweet, of course, but in no way sugary. Aromatic is the word most commonly used – and indeed I’ve already used it here of muscat wine – but to me this implies something almost perfumed. That’s true of the wine but rather overstates the scent-like quality of the unvinified grape, which is just as well really, because who wants to chew perfume? Spicy, perhaps, but, if so, you would be justified in enquiring: what spice? I couldn’t name a single one without exaggerating the similarity, though coriander is sometimes cited in this context. Chemically, I'm told the crucial ingredients are certain terpene compounds, but how soulless that sounds, and who knows what terpene tastes like, anyway? The mere word puts you off wanting to know, which would be a mistake. Oh, I give up. Muscat grapes taste, uniquely, of muscat grapes. It’s a full flavour, rich and delicious, which puts that of other grapes in the shade. It’s also long-lasting and stays in the mouth even after you’ve swallowed – or spat out – the pips.

What to eat them with

Well, muscat wine, of course. Or a red wine if you’re going to make them an accompaniment to cheese, with which they do go exceptionally well, especially mature soft cheeses like brie or camembert (cheeses that British supermarkets, as you might expect, almost always sell immature, before they have developed their full flavour; in France you would be asked on which day you plan to eat the cheese, so they can pick out one at the right stage of ripeness for you). A sprinkling of muscat grapes will complement any cheeseboard, though, for appearance as well as taste. Nuts too, especially almonds and walnuts, which of course also go well with cheeses. Ah, a fresh baguette, a petit camembert, a bunch of muscat grapes, a handful of almonds, a bottle of wine and, let us say, a view of the Luberon hills with bees buzzing around the lavender fields on the lower slopes. I do believe we have the makings of a picnic.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Quirinale Restaurant in Westminster, I see from my researches, offers a salad of quail and muscat grapes with foie gras dressing, but this sounds a bit too rich even for my palate. Apart from which, I’m told that eating at this venue entails a serious danger of encountering politicians, which rules it out for those of us who care about the company we keep.

Availability

Reluctant to recommend a product without providing some idea of where it might be obtained, and even more reluctant to put you in danger of encountering politicians by resorting to Westminster restaurants, I have been scouring the internet for other sources of muscat grapes in Britain. And, lo and behold, they can be found, although not, it would appear, from any of the main food retailers.

Let’s start with those main food retailers. Of the five largest supermarket chains, none stocks muscat grapes. The nearest approach is by Waitrose, who, as “speciality grapes”, stock Italia seeded white. Italia is actually a hybrid variety, which includes muscat in its genetic make-up and does have a slightly muscatish flavour, but lacks the depth and complexity of the original, much as ginger nuts do not have the full flavour of ginger. Still, at least Waitrose can be credited with a gesture in the right direction. As for the rest, they’re dire. Almost all the grapes on offer are described simply as red, white or green – a tricolore which does not even represent Italia. One knows only too well the kind of grapes these are; just as in cricket, where batsmen who fail to make any runs are said not to “have troubled the scorers”, these won’t trouble the tastebuds.

As an aside, another gripe: why do so many supermarkets – and Waitrose are as much at fault in this as any of their rivals – sell grapes in plastic bags sealed by a kind of plastic zip-fastener? What can this device possibly add, except cost and inconvenience? It’s simply senseless. Grrrhhh!

Marks and Spencer sounded like a possible source of muscat grapes. I couldn’t find any mention on their website, but that isn’t fully comprehensive where foodstuffs are concerned, so I rang my local branch to check. After repeated attempts, the charming “customer representative” to whom I spoke couldn’t rouse anyone from the food department to tell me. I think we’ll take that as a no.

Seeking to go upmarket, I tried the websites of Harrods, Fortnum and Mason and Selfridges Food Hall, all to no avail. But the following came up trumps, or quasi-trumps at least:

1. www.natoora.co.uk, where £3.75 for a half-kilo punnet looks good value and cheaper, I notice, at current exchange rates than the same quantity costs from www.carrefour.fr if you were shopping in France (as well as comparing reasonably with £3.10 for the equivalent weight of Italia if you were buying from Waitrose).

2. www.freshdirect.co.uk, which seems to claim to have them, but where price and ordering procedures were all a bit impenetrable to my perhaps inadequate navigational skills – this is not, in my view, a very user-friendly website.

In either case, placing an internet order might seem like a lot of trouble to go to for a bunch of grapes, however tasty. Another drawback of using these sources that occurs to me is that it might undermine one justification for nipping over to France on a shopping spree, albeit a minor one when France offers so many other appetising attractions. Within the UK, if you wanted to buy muscat grapes in person so as to be able to inspect the goods, you might find them at superior specialist greengrocers where these still exist, but the options that came up on the internet are only two and far between: the Cambridge Cheese Company Limited; and home grown from West Dean Gardens, near Chichester, and there only when they ripen sufficiently for sale.

Grow your own?

The example of West Dean does put one in mind of the d-i-y approach, and many horticultural websites have muscat vines for sale. But you would need the right soil and micro-climate, and ideally to grow them under glass. You also need to be patient, hard-pruning the vine for several years to develop the roots before expecting any fruit. In our garden, we have for nearly two decades nurtured a vine in the open, trained on a south-facing wall, and the grapes practically never ripen enough for eating. After one particularly hot summer my younger son and I squeezed the ripest for home-made wine, but, even after blending with a blander grape concentrate, the result was still too tannic and acidic for comfortable drinking. Like Hamburg, it seems mid-Kent must wait for global warming.

Cost-benefit analysis

Just in case the difficulty, or even the cost, of obtaining muscat grapes is putting you off, or you are unconvinced by my assertion of their superior flavour, here’s another way to look at them. They have been shown to contain exceptionally high levels of the healthy antioxidants known as flavonoids; also, like many red grapes, they are rich in quercetin, a recently identified anti-cancer compound that research suggests can suppress malignant cells before they grow into tumours. If you think of muscat grapes as a health food rather than just as a fruit, they really look quite economical.

Finally, buying muscat grapes, even if it means going out of your way, is a way of thumbing your nose at Britain’s arrogant supermarkets and their assumption that you are no more than passive checkout-fodder. Now that’s a gesture of inestimable value.

© torr 2009