It started
with a muffin.
Many years ago, my friend Greg Schnorr was known as the Muffin Man. There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, which is that Greg was a baker and made muffins. This is worth pointing out because most of the nicknames acquired by people I know have considerably less reasonable explanations, and several cannot be repeated on a family-friendly grape juice website.
Eventually Greg got into farming and planted a vineyard here in Walla Walla. Among the things he planted was Muscat Ottonel, a funny little European grape that smells wonderful, tastes wonderful, and had the minor commercial disadvantage that absolutely nobody around here was looking for any.
I was running the wine program at Walla Walla Community College at the time, and Greg having grapes nobody wanted struck me as exactly the sort of problem I was professionally qualified to make more complicated.
So I took them.
We made wine out of them. Then we made more wine out of them. Over the years hundreds of students worked with Greg’s Muscat. We entered some in competitions. We won some awards. Every fall the grapes would come in smelling like flowers and peaches, everybody would eat them while we were processing them, and then we would immediately set about turning them into something else.
Somewhere during all of this, the Muffin Man’s Muscat became Muffcat. I don’t remember who said it first. I’m not entirely convinced anyone does. But once a word like Muffcat gets loose among a group of winemakers, there is very little chance of getting it back in the cage.
And so this went on for about fourteen years.
Then one day it occurred to us that we might be idiots.
Here we had spent fourteen years growing these beautiful certified-organic Walla Walla grapes, hauling them around, fermenting them, fussing over them, teaching students with them and generally applying every bit of winemaking knowledge we possessed to a grape that everybody agreed was absolutely delicious straight off the vine.
What if we just squeezed the damn things?
That was Muffcat.
We picked Greg’s Muscat Ottonel while it was still bright and fresh, pressed it gently, bottled the juice and, for perhaps the first time in our long association, resisted the temptation to improve it to death.
It only took us fourteen years to figure out grape juice.
In our defense, we were busy.
