Muscadines

My father-in-law brought me a bag of these that he picked on his property in NC. Does that mean that I have to make jelly? :-) The grapes on the plate are sitting out to ripen a little more. They are bronze when ripe. Below is a snipet of info about them, in case you've never heard of them before. They are considered the first grapes in America. They are also called scuppernongs.

They were as wild and untamed as the land they covered. In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh described them as being "on the sand and on the green soil, on the hills as on the plains, as well as on every little shrub ... also climbing towards the tops of tall cedars ... in all the world the like abundance is not to be found."

This early English explorer had landed on the coast of North Carolina and was describing muscadine grapes, Vitis rotundifolia, the bronze or purple-black fruit that was growing profusely throughout what is now the southeastern United States. Today, more than 400 years later, scientists with USDA's Agricultural Research Service and Mississippi State University have even more reason to be excited about the muscadine. Research conducted by ARS horticulturist James B. Magee and Mississippi State nutritionist Betty J. Ector predicts that the muscadine will not only be an alternative crop for growers in the Southeast, but a new health food as well.

Magee and Ector have found significant amounts of resveratrol the compound in French red and white wines that is being touted as an agent for lowering cholesterol levels and the risk of coronary heart disease—in the skin, pulp, and seeds of these grapes.