A WORLD OF LEGENDS

Our purpose in this publication is to provide wine-lovers with some information in particular about the Moscato or muscatel grape and the wondeful wines that are made from this grape in Piedmont, in the Northwest of Italy.

In fact, the latest scientific research tells us that the muscatel was actually the first grape ever cultivated, the prgenitor of the entire vinegrowing industr and the mother of all the infinite varieties that have evolved to our days.

"Our" grape is technically called "Moscato bianco di Canelli" (the white Canelli muscatel), to distinguish it from the numerous other varieties of muscatel that can be found virtually anywhere in Italy and throughout the world.

Indeed, muscatel was already a very popular wine among the Greeks and Romans. The Muscatellum (appropiately resinated for those times), accompanied the copious libations of the Latins.

Today, the wine muscatel has found its chosen home in a small area in the south of Piedmont, a hilly range of fifty-two tiny villages running through three provinces. In its centre, Canelli, in the province of Asti, Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo, and Strevi, in the province of Alessandria.

It is a land with a deeply felt wine - growing vocation and whose soil and climate place it in that precious segment in Europe that is the birthplace of great wines. It is an area blessed for its wines which do not lose their fruity bouquet, their longevity and unmistakable excellence.

Every year this grape, which ripens to a golden yellow, is pressed around September 15th just as they to press it in the sixteenth century (the wine-making rules were first codified by Giovanni Battista Croce, a jeweller of the royal family of Savoia). They use wine-presses with rollers to archieve a smooth pressing, after which the solids, skins and stalks, are separated by means of air or water-powered presses that apply a soft pressure, in order to preserve the full flavor of the grape.

The juice thus obtained is the transferred into strain-less steel contrainers and kept cool, at a temperature of zero degrees centigrade, to prevent fermentation.