There is more to grapes than red and white. And it’s a bit more complicated than “white grapes make white wine”.
Let’s take the Muscat Rouge à Petits Grains: excuse our possibly crude translation “Red Muscat with Small Grape Size”. The skin of the grape is a pale, red colour, but guess what kind of wines you make with them? White wines. Yes, you can make white wine with red grapes. In the Muscat family, you will find grapes with white, yellow, pink, red, and black skins, but you will struggle to find anything but white wines made from these grapes. But how does that even work?
It’s all about how the wine is made. If the grape skins are left in for the fermentation process, the wine will be red. If they are separated from the juice after crushing, the wine will be white. Of course, if the grape skins don’t have much red pigment– or are white– to start off with, the wine would not be red regardless. Of course, most white wines are made from white grapes and red wine of red. But that’s one confusion cleared up.
Our Muscat and Liqueur Muscat made from the aforementioned Muscat Rouge à Petits Grains but you wouldn’t call the wine a Red Muscat. As far as we’re aware, there is no such thing as a wine called the Red Muscat explicitly. But you might find a Red Moscato– made primarily from Moscato D’Asti grapes, but with another red wine blended in. Basically, it’s a Pink Moscato, with a little more red wine added.
Another of the great confusions that wine drinkers encounter is due to the doubling-up of names. The sheer number of terms to discuss a single grape variety or wine type is overwhelming. A single variety of grape could have twenty or thirty synonymous terms. And in some cases, more. Often, you’ll find that a wine variety is named after the grape used to create it. Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Muscat. It seems a relatively straightforward and sensible way to name a wine, but it’s not the only way.
Regional variances create even more terminology. A Pinot Noir grown in the Burgundy region in France is not a Pinot Noir, it’s a Burgundy. These name changes are not there to baffle new drinkers– they’re there to reflect the richness and diversity of the wine world. A Pinot Noir produced in Australia– blended with the same hand– would taste different to a Burgundy from France. Regions, climates, soil– they all make a big difference. And rather than resenting the sheer number of terms at work in the wine world, we embrace the spirit of curiosity and inquisition. And we embrace it at our cellar doors and online.
We welcome questions about our vines, our wines, and our processes. We’re passionate about making and sharing our wines– we want you to love them just as much as we do.