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A few weeks ago I bought a pint of scuppernongs from a woman selling them by the side of the road. Scuppernongs are wild grapes that have been tamed and cultivated and are called muscadines now.
Scuppernongs, Muscadines--all the same thing. They are bronze colored, about the size of a gum ball and have a very tough skin. When you bite into one, it is sweet, and has a thick pulpy mouth feel, with hard seeds imbedded in the pulp about the size and look of ticks.

So the seller is handing them to me through the car window, and I'm holding open a plastic bag for the little container, when some of them fell to the floorboard of the car. We picked up all we could find, but I had seen some of them fall into that no man's land between the car seats. You'd think it's be easy to see a muscadine. We looked, thinking we'd gotten them all.

Well, I began to notice a few days ago that when I opened my car door, I got a distinct smell of wineiness. Those lost muscadines inside that hot car had fermented and started to exude wine. I could picture being stopped by the cops for something, and rolling down the car window and having a wino smell hit him in the nose.

I looked with a flashlight as best I could to locate them and couldn't find 'em. I went to the Red Arrow car wash and had them use those big vacuums to find them and suck them up. They moved the car seats forward and backward along their tracks--sounds of "shloops" and "shlurps" with the vacuuming and they got everything out--just two muscadines had caused all that smell.

Next year, as an experiment, I'm gonna buy some muscadines and let them ferment in a jar and see if they'll make wine in a controlled environment. Bet it would be good!

susil