I've been gorging on grapes. Like a wild boar. In quantitative terms, anyway, even if I haven't been tearing them off the vines with my teeth, rooting in the earth, and pounding their skins with my rattling mouthstones.

Never in my life have I had the chance to eat such delicious table grapes as I have this autumn, from the markets hereabouts. Some have been Alphonse (Alphonse Lavallé); some Chasselas; but most Black Muscat. I suspect this is mainly Muscat d'Hambourg (Schiava Grossa x Muscat d'Alexandrie on DNA evidence, eliminating the previously assumed Schiava = Trollinger = Black Hamburg synonymy) rather than Muscat Noir à Petits Grains.

Black Hamburg/Muscat d'Hambourg is the great greenhouse grape in the UK - including the magnificent Hampton Court specimen, planted by Capability Brown in 1768 and still producing 270 kg a year. (If you want one of your own, see the Crocus Plants website:
www.crocus.co.uk… though I note they still call it Schiava. Once a slave girl, always a slave girl.)

Why so good? A wonderful sweet-acid balance in the first place, and all the classic Muscatty turpenes to add perfume to the mouth. The result is a small detonation of pleasure with each grape. Addictive -- and digestively bracing, too, especially if you're not too fussy about spitting pips.

And … it's revenge. Revenge for those table grapes I used to glower at in the UK. Pink Flame and Red Flame and other Globe types: enormous, swollen, seedless, juiceless, flavourless objects the size of a small apricot, stiff with rigor-mortised flesh, air-freighted about the world at enormous expense to bring no pleasure at all to those who eat them, shame and disgrace on those who breed them and bad karma on those who grow them.

I always wanted to tip them out of their stiff plastic coffins onto the supermarket floor and stamp on them, in truculent sympathy with the delicious grapes which those same supermarkets had not bought, precisely because they weren't as big, swollen, heavy and rigor-mortised. I was too well-behaved, of course, and merely internalised the frustration to what was no doubt damaging psychological effect (should I have sued?). Anyway, all that is behind me now and I am in grape heaven, for a month or two at least. Revenge is sweet - and perfumed.