It was a hot day and I was thankful I was working at Ye Olde Wine Shoppe. The air conditioning was humming and wine customers were coming in to escape the heat.

I was in the “sticky room,” as we call it, known to most as the dessert/wine room. I was reorganizing the stock in the room, and dusting and resetting the port section when I was surprised by two men in their early 30s.

One was tall and thin and the other had had a few too many pizzas and beer. I could tell he had a passion for the sweet stuff. “Do you have any moscato or muscat?” the big guy asked.

I was happy that they knew that muscat and moscato is the same grape – just the French and Italian name for it, respectively.

“Yes, of course we do,” I said, and both gents’ faces zippered up a smile. “We have in our champagne room some Asti Spumante, which is as bubbly and sweet as sparkling wines get. It is made with 100 percent moscato grapes.”

The chubbier one said, “No, we were thinking more of a dessert wine.”

“Well, we have plenty over by the Sauternes,” I said as I headed for the section.

The tall guy asked, “Why can some wines be so sweet and some other wines be so dry?”

“That is a great question,” I said, stepping up onto my soap box. “A lot of people think winemakers add sugar to wine to make it sweet but that’s not true. Grapes are one of the sweetest fruits on the planet, with far more sugar per volume than sugar cane or sugar beets. Yeast turns grape sugar into alcohol, but you can arrest the fermentation process in a variety of ways because yeast can only convert grape sugar into alcohol at certain temperatures. Turn the temperature down and fermentation is done; you’re left with a wine as dry or as sweet as you like.”

The string-bean fellow saw the picture on the wall of a cluster of moscato grapes and said, “Moscato is kind of a pale, yellowish green.”

“Yeah, and what I find appealing about the wine is that is very floral and has low acids, which brings out the honeysuckle sweetness of the wine,” I said.

I brought out a bottle of Moscato d’Asti.

“This wine is a cousin of Asti Spumante,” I said. “But unlike spumante it has only a tinge of bubbles, which the Italians call frizzante, or lightly sparkling. Moscato can either be sweet or very sweet. They do make it dry, but I have never seen any imported into the country.”

The plump one said, “The moscato we had at the restaurant wasn’t sparkling at all.”

“Italian winemakers love to play around with wine,” I explained. “They make the wine dry or sweet, a table wine or a dessert wine, still, frizzante or full-on spumante.

“They even dry the grapes in the sun like raisins, called the passito method, and then ferment it,” I continued. “The result is so luscious that it has been called ‘liquid sunshine,’ like Moscato di Pantelleria from Sicily. Some moscato wines are even fortified with neutral spirits like the famous French wine Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise. It is OK to be creative in the wine biz.”

I showed them a bottle of Jaboulet Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise and their smiles almost knocked their ears off.

“I have a bottle chilling in the wine bar. Would you like to try some?” I asked. “This wine has almost as much alcohol as a port and has about 11 percent residual sugar.”

“Don’t worry,” the skinny guy said. “I was planning to see my dentist next Tuesday.”

We all laughed.