ATLANTA — How do you tell the difference between a native Southerner and a Johns Creek-come-lately?
Start with a muscadine. You know, one of those taut, pingpong-ball grapes that show up in stores between August and October.
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The Yankee, perhaps remembering the days of seeded table grapes, will bite through the tough skin and juicy pulp to the rubbery knot of flesh in the center that holds the seeds, crunching on one before picking them out of his mouth. "That was interesting," he'll say as the last mouthful — in turns bitter, astringent and shockingly sweet — goes down.
The Southerner, remembering the vine that used to grow in his grandma's backyard, goes right for the good stuff. He'll split the grape's skin and pop the sweet center right into his mouth, which he'll swallow along with the seeds. He tosses the skins, but when he was little, he let his frugal grandma collect them to blanch, sweeten and bake into a grape hull pie.
The South's native grape species, Vitis rotundifolia, has a strange personality that you only begin to appreciate after time. To anthropomorphize: She's a woman who faces the world in a zipped-up trench coat but who reveals to acquaintances an overfondness for perfume and makeup. Or maybe she's Eve, the robot from "Wall-E" who has a soft heart and sweet voice under her shiny, seemingly impenetrable shell.
Lately, though, this old gal has been making some noise.
Medical research is showing the grapes to be exceptionally rich in anti-oxidants. More commercially cultivated muscadines are showing up on supermarket shelves, bringing in new fans. Wineries, particularly in North Carolina and Georgia, are proving that the grapes can make complex dry wines as well as sugar-sweet ones. And Southern chefs are cottoning to their ultra-grapey flavor: Scott Crawford at the Georgian Room at the Cloister at Sea Island finds it a perfect foil for cured trout.
Yes, that flavor. It may at first strike you as cloyingly sweet, like grape jam. Or you may find more in it, particularly if you try the bronze muscadines, also known as scuppernongs. In "The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook" (Norton, $35), brothers Matt and Ted Lee describe the flavor of scuppernongs as "a burst of nectar with hints of honeysuckle, orange flower and jasmine, with a spike of acidity and lingering accents of cola and ripe melon."
The muscadine is the one native American grape species that has adapted, with its thick skin, to the heat, sun, bugs and fungi prevalent in the South. Unsubstantiated legend has it that all muscadines are descended from the 400-year-old mother vine on Roanoke Island in North Carolina. As settlers brought clippings throughout the South, the vines took off and began to grow wild.
Today, you can find wild muscadine vines everywhere. It's hard to walk along a sidewalk on St. Simons Island this time of year without seeing the vines creeping over hedges.
Back in Atlanta, we may know someone with a backyard vine, but we're more apt to find the plumper cultivated muscadines in supermarkets. Harry's Farmers Markets, Whole Foods Markets and DeKalb Farmers Market all get their grapes from Paulk Vineyards in South Georgia, one of the country's leading commercial producers.
The Paulks have planted 600 acres of vines near the town of Ocilla. The Paulks, all descended from a mule trader, are to Ocilla what the Fords are to Detroit. Various Paulks run the funeral home, post placards in their bids for public office and set up gift shops around town. Because of the Paulks, muscadines also figure prominently in Ocilla. At the Cafe at Fourth, chef Terry Crain prepares a roast pork loin with muscadine sauce.
Drive out of town, past the FSHG ("Father, Son and Holy Ghost") Junkyard, and you'll think you've discovered a hidden wine estate. Every hill crests with neat rows of vine.
Jacob Paulk, 76, and his son, Gary, 51, run the table grape business. They each have their own acreage and use color-coded picking hampers to track the grapes through packing and distribution. The Paulks plant mostly the Supreme and Jumbo varieties — the big grapes people want.
Many small retailers drive right up to the packing plant to get their grapes. Among the more colorful customers is a 90-something Cuban- American from Miami who drives his truck up and back in a day once a year. Various moonshiners appear, too. One claims they "take the poisons out" of the hooch.
National sales have grown a bit, thanks in part to the Whole Foods distribution chain, where the grapes have found a small audience beyond the South. Markets may pick them up when a transplanted Southerner asks for them. The Paulks have also begun a small planting of organic grapes.
But the future of the business lies with Gary's son, Chris. A Georgia Tech grad, Chris, 30, joined the family business and started making muscadine products through a separate corporation. In addition to bottled juice and preserves, he has begun production of dietary supplements — a potentially huge market. A new production facility, smack in the middle of the vineyards, goes on line this year.
That may be an easier sell than getting new consumers to eat the grapes out of hand. Gary Paulk has to strike a tricky balance with marketing. Southerners want grapes as big as golf balls and don't care about seeds. Newcomers take one look at the springy grapes and suspect they could shoot them 200 yards down the fairway with a driver.
"Take a look at this," says Gary, pulling a reddish orangey-brown scuppernong no bigger than a marble from a bin. "It's the Summit variety. It's almost got a strawberry flavor, but I can't sell them. They're too small."
It is a glorious grape — a seesaw of acidity and sweetness, with a rush of fruit flavors. The astringent crunch of the skin and the floral sweetness of the juice keep each other from their worst excesses.
It is like an August day in Georgia, when you walk from brutal heat and humidity into icy air conditioning and love that moment of both. If you live here, you develop a tough skin and demand serious refreshment.
John Kessler writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: jkessler AT ajc.com
