Moscatel

This term is primarily associated with the name of a grape variety. In fact, it is an umbrella term for different varieties, crosses or new varieties with Muscat involvement and also not so rarely unrelated grape varieties. It is therefore not possible to speak of a group of varieties, let alone a Muscat family (the same phenomenon also applies to the four name groups Lambrusco, Malvasia, Trebbiano and Vernaccia). There are Muscat varieties with berries in all imaginable shades of white, yellow, grey, green, pink, red, brown, violet, blue and black. According to one of the many hypotheses, the variety was already known to the Egyptians and Persians around 3,000 BC, for which wall paintings are sometimes cited as evidence. However, there is no conclusive evidence for this, as identification is obviously not possible with such pictorial representations.

Ancestry

The ancestry is in any case unknown; the parent varieties are presumably already extinct. Greece or Italy is considered the probable origin. This is supported by the fact that there are descendants and relationships to other varieties in both countries. According to this, it was possibly brought to Europe by the Greeks and spread by the Romans in their domain. It is said that the emperors Charlemagne (742-814) and Frederick I Barbarossa (1122-1190) were great admirers of muscatel. The fact that muscatel wine...