Some aromatic grapes come at you in needily exhausting waves, like a suffocating room freshener. Happily, moschofilero is not one of those. In both white and rosé it has a distinctive scent of rose and lemon, or lemongrass.
The floral notes are understated, like a just-picked rose, but as David Porter of Lea & Sandeman, a big fan of this grape, points out, they are also “profound”: there is a luxurious, just-there weight that amplifies the more fruity, raspberry-like side of the rose smell, then balances it with a riffle of pink peppercorn.
The lemon, meanwhile, is soft like lemon blossom but brings a nip of astringency to the taste, like the bitter prickle of lemon or grapefruit rind, giving a refreshing grip as you sip.
Moschofilero (which technically refers to a cluster of clones that share the same DNA but whose grapes can have different coloured skins, though in practice, when people talk about moschofilero, they usually mean the pinkish kind) dominates the wine region of Mantinia, in the Peloponnese in southern Greece.
Patrick Leigh Fermor once described the map view of the Peloponnese as looking like “a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southwards in jagged and carious roots”. The writer made his very elegant home in one of those jagged peninsulas; Mantinia is found inland, about where the tooth joins the roots.
Dining and Cooking