White grape
Muscat of Alexandria
How to read this
Capitals mark the stressed syllable. “ew” is “ee” said with rounded lips. “ahn” is a nasal vowel: say it through the nose, with no n. The French r comes from the back of the throat. The recording is the reference.
Muscat of Alexandria, a large-berried late Muscat, is named once under its own name among the white grapes of the Gironde, by André Jullien in 1816; in 1850 du Puits de Maconex, a grower at Gradignan, found that it ripened badly at Bordeaux.
Muscat of Alexandria is a white Muscat with very large, elongated berries. In 1816 André Jullien, the Paris wine merchant whose Topographie de tous les vignobles connus mapped the vineyards of the known world, listed “le muscat d’Alexandrie” among the white grapes most generally grown in the Gironde, after the muscat blanc and before the malaga, the sauvignon, and the sémillon. No later Gironde book repeats it as a wine grape, and the identity rests on the name, so it is likely.
M. du Puits de Maconex, a grower at Gradignan, in his Guide du propriétaire de vigne (1850), described it among table grapes as the latest of the Muscats, one that “ripens badly at Bordeaux” and does better below Lyon, and advised training it against walls under a small roof to keep off the rain and dew that made it shed its flowers. C. Ladrey, in his 1872 Traité de viticulture et d’œnologie, gives Panse musquée as another of its names. Auguste Petit-Lafitte also listed a Panse Musquée among the muscat-flavored whites of the Bordelais in 1868; whether it is the same vine is open.
Oldest record in my library: as “passemusquée”, whose identity with this grape is open: abbé Bellet’s catalog of the vines of Bordeaux and Cadillac, 1736, as printed in Viala and Vermorel, Ampélographie, vol. 1, 1910, and “Muscat de Malaga ou passemusquée”, 1785, in Jean-Baptiste de Secondat, Mémoire sur la culture des vignes de la Guienne; under its own name, “le muscat d’Alexandrie”, 1816, in André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus
The family
Parents unknown.
Muscat of Alexandria
The names
As the Gironde books wrote it: muscat d'Alexandrie.
In today’s rules
Not named in the rules of any Bordeaux appellation today.
In the books
“In white, the muscat blanc, the muscat of Alexandria, the malaga, the sauvignon, the semilion”
En blanc, le muscat blanc, le muscat d y A- lexandrie, le malaga, le sauvignon, le semilion
“Muscat of Alexandria: very large, elongated berries; the latest, ripens badly at Bordeaux”
Muscat d'Alexandrie très grosses baies allongées"; le plus tardif, mûrit mal à Bordeaux
Sources
- André Jullien, Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, 1st ed., 1816, Gironde, 'plants le plus généralement cultivés'
- M. du Puits de Maconex, Guide du propriétaire de vigne, Bordeaux, P. Chaumas, 1850 (bound with A. Joubert, Culture de la vigne dans le Médoc, in the library copy), 'Vignes cultivées pour raisins de table', p. 82
- C. Ladrey, Traité de viticulture et d'oenologie, vol. 1, Viticulture, 1872, sixth ripening period, white grapes
- Auguste Petit-Lafitte, La vigne dans le Bordelais, 1868, Panse Musquée
- Pierre Viala & Victor Vermorel, Ampélographie, t. I, Paris, Masson, 1910, 'Histoire de l'ampélographie' (Tallavignes), p. 537 note, printing abbé Bellet's 1736 catalog of the vines of Bordeaux and Cadillac (dated 1736 by Petit-Lafitte, La vigne dans le Bordelais, 1868)
- Jean-Baptiste de Secondat, Mémoires sur l’histoire naturelle du chêne […], sur la culture de la vigne, et sur le vin de la Guienne, Paris, De Bure fils aîné, 1785
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