Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise

Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise is a vin doux naturel from the southern Rhône, made at the foot of the Dentelles de Montmirail near Gigondas, and the name is slightly misleading: there is nothing especially natural about it, and the sweetness is retained by intervention rather than left alone.

The method is mutage. Fermentation is stopped partway by adding neutral grape spirit, which kills the yeast and leaves a substantial amount of the grape's own sugar unfermented. The wine ends at around fifteen per cent alcohol with roughly 110 grams of residual sugar, and crucially the sugar is entirely from the fruit — nothing is added.

The grape is Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains, the finest of the Muscat family, and the point of stopping fermentation early is to capture its aromatics before they are lost. The wine smells emphatically of the fresh grape: orange blossom, apricot, peach, lychee and a lifted, musky floral note, with candied citrus underneath.

It should be drunk young and cold. Unlike Port or Madeira, this is not a wine that gains from age; the fresh aromatics are the whole proposition and they fade within a few years. Some producers make an oxidative aged version, which is a different and much rarer thing.

It is served as an aperitif in the region, which is worth trying — chilled hard, it works better before a meal than the dessert-wine label suggests — and with fruit tarts, apricot desserts and blue cheese afterwards.