Wine of the Week: Ser Winery 2022 Dry Orange Muscat

Welcome to Laurie Love on Wine! I am Laurie Love, a professional wine writer and educator based in Santa Cruz. In this column, I share my wine passion, knowledge, and experience with Lookout readers. Follow me on my wine blog, Laurie Loves Wine, and on Instagram at LaurieLoveOnWine. I love email from readers! Stay in touch: Email me at laurie@lookoutlocal.com. Join me as we journey together through the wonderful world of wine.

Each column, I share a particular wine that I’m enjoying now. The Wine of the Week this week is …

Ser Winery 2022 Dry Orange Muscat ($30)

This delightfully aromatic and refreshing white wine from Ser Winery is like spring in a glass. Sunny with Meyer lemon notes, orange peel, green pear, unripe peach, rose and just-flowering pink jasmine, the wine is so pretty. Very pale in the glass and delicate on the palate, it’s friendly and approachable.

The wine is made from 100% orange muscat grapes. This is a dry wine (that is, not sweet) made from a grape varietal that is typically used to make sweet wines. Orange muscat (or technically called Moscato Fior d’Arancio) is one of many siblings of the muscat grape. It is best known from Colli Euganei, a small subregion in the Veneto winegrowing region of northeast Italy, where a small portion of it is grown on hilly volcanic soils for sweet dessert wines. Here in California, it is very rare indeed. The fruit for Ser’s orange muscat came from the Carrasco Vineyard in Paso Robles, Ser’s first vintage sourced from there. 

Ser’s Dry Orange Muscat makes an excellent aperitif or picnic wine. But it also works great at the table. It pairs beautifully with mildly spicy Thai or Vietnamese dishes, seafood salad and hard Italian cheese. The slight perception of sweetness in the wine counterbalances salty qualities in food and acts as a foil for spicier dishes. Serve chilled, but not too cold as that will stifle the inherent aromatic qualities of the fruit.

Nicole Walsh is the founder and winemaker of Ser Winery. She also has been the winemaker for the Bonny Doon Vineyard label and has partnered with Randall Grahm for over 20 years, both in winemaking and in the vineyard. About a year ago to the day, these winemaking titans joined forces and now share the Doon to Earth tasting room in Aptos.

Walsh also makes a Ser Winery Sparkling Orange Muscat. The 2020 vintage was meant to be a dry, still white wine, but instead due to the threat of possible smoke taint on the grapes from all the wildfire activity in the area at that time, the grapes were harvested earlier than usual, which gave them lower sugar and higher acid levels. Those chemistry levels are perfect for sparkling wine, so Ser decided to go with the flow and make a sparkling wine out of it. 

A small percentage of orange muscat (9.5%) also made its way into the blend for Bonny Doon Vineyard’s new 2023 Le Cigare Orange, a skin-contact orange wine made by macerating white grapes for 14 to 16 days with their skins still on to yield the orange color. (Normally, white grapes destined for white wine are pressed off their skins and the wine is only made from the pulp and juice.)

You can buy the wine at the Doon to Earth tasting room (10 Parade St., Suite B, Aptos), which is open Thursdays through Sundays. It’s a fun place to try unique wines in a casual atmosphere. Check its website for opening times and much more info.

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