Claude Kolm
Claude Kolm
Hi, Don,
I've not been aware of the Vandyke Price book, but other sources (published prior to her book) indicate that the wine gradually gained popularity after WWII. E.g., 1974 version of Lichine's New Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits (1974): "The light, fresh wine, most of it charming only when it is young, used to be known in its own region alone. Later on, Paris discovered it and took it up; since World War II it has made its way abroad and gradually become popular."
The original (1971) edition of Johnson's World Atlas of Wine says ". . . Muscadet is the modern success story of the Loire. It was an unknown vin de pays 40 years ago. Today it is the accepted drink with the splendid seafood of northern France; in the last 20 years the vineyard area has doubled."
Earlier 20th Century anglophone sources are mixed. P. Morton Shand's A Book of French Wines (1928) says that Muscadet and Gros Plant yield "passable" vins ordinaires resembling the typical vin du pays of the Departement de Loire-Inférieure called "Vin de Vallet" under which they are often sold. {He also has some nice things to say about Pineau d'Aunis, which he calls Chenin Noir.}
Julien Street's Wines (1933) has two sentences devoted to Muscadet: "Muscadet is a light white luncheon wine, very palatable. But these wines will not be coming to this country, so there is no use going on."
H. Warner Allen's White Wines and Cognac (1952) says that a great deal white wine is produced in the Pays du Muscadet. He says that the better wine are from Muscadet and that they "lack breed and refinement of bouquet, but are sound straightforward and of a neutral character which makes them invaluable to the blender." He mentions that they often "masquerade as Chablis and in a good year may bear some resemblance to one of the Bourgognes des environs de Chablis."
The most positive of these first half of the 20th century writers was Maurice Healy in his Stay With Me Flagons (originally published in 1941, I am looking at a 1959 print of the 1949 edition, but it is unclear if the 1949 edition contained any revision of the 1941 text): ". . . a little lower down on the Loire we find an excellent wine made from the Muscadet grape, tow kinds of which I have cellared to my complete satisfaction; it travels well. It is a harder and dryer wine [than Vouvray, which he had immediately prior been discussing] with a strange flavour entirely its own, that is very hard to describe; it is almost as though the wine had been bottled in a room where there was a lot of wood-smoke." He then goes on to talk about the wines of Pouilly in the same paragraph, leading one to wonder if he thought this the other style of Muscadet, since he previously had described only one, but I think not.
A number of other books from the first half of the 20th century by British authors of course discuss nothing outside of claret, Burgundy, Hock, Port, and Champagne.
In the 19th century, I've dipped much less. Cyrus Redding in French Wines and Vineyards and the Way to Find Them (1860) says merely that "there are two qualities of wine made from the muscadet and enragé grape one of the worst in all France."
The English and abridged version of Jullien's Topography of All Known Vineyards (1824) has no mention of Muscadet, but the original French version (1816) mentions Muscadet only in the context of eau-de-vie. It also mentions Muscadet as one of the grape types planted in the Ile de France. In the 1832 edition, for the wines of the Department of the Loire Inférieure, he syas that the whites around Nantes are "communs." On the following page, talking about the wines of Valet, he says that there is a large production of common white wine with a disagreeable goût de terroir that have a tendency to become fat. He mentions large shipments to Paris where the wines are used for blending with red (!) wines.