Fringe Wine

Terret (Gris or Blanc) - Vin de Pays d'Oc (Languedoc), France

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:31:00 +0000

Weird Blend Wednesday is only a few weeks old but I am already in a position where I need to put it off for a week or two. The post I was planning to write actually will rely on two other posts that I haven't written yet so rather than jump the gun, I'm calling an audible and will be talking about an unusual, inexpensive little wine that I found while I was visiting my mother in South Carolina over the Christmas holidays.

While scouring the shelves in the local wine shop, I found this bottle that said it was made from the Terret grape. Sounds simple enough, but things are never quite that easy around here. Terret is actually a small family grapes, much like the Pinot family, with (at least) three members. The Terret family has been around southern France for a long time and is marked by the frequency and ease with which it mutates. The three main members of the family are differentiated by the color of the skin of the berries, but some authorities have reported that the grape is so genetically unstable, there are some vines that have all three berry colors within the same cluster.

There is the red-skinned Terret Noir, which is perhaps best known as one of the official Chateauneuf-du-Pape grapes. In the early 19th Century it was very widely planted in southern France, but by 2007 total plantings throughout the country stood at under 200 hectares total. There is also Terret Gris which, as you might expect, is the pink-skinned version of the grape. Terret Gris is grown primarily in the Languedoc region of France and is officially allowed in the Corbières, Minervois and Coteaux du Languedoc AOCs. By the numbers, Terret Gris is the most commonly planted member of the family, covering about 2,500 hectares, but those numbers (and most official registers and statistics), for whatever reason, lump both Terret Gris and Terret Blanc together. Terret Blanc is the most unusual of the three and most sources indicate that it is a white-skinned mutation, meaning it is probably the newest member of the Terret family, though it isn't clear whether it mutated from the Noir or the Gris version. The heyday for the light-berried members of the Terret family was the 1980's when, taken together, Terret Gris and Terret Blanc were the ninth most planted grape in France, covering almost 5,000 hectares of land.

We would all like to believe that quality revolutions are inherently good things, but they can leave some innocent bystanders in their wake. The quality revolution going on now in the Languedoc has been very good for many of the winemakers and for many consumers as wines from this region are increasingly sought after both for their high quality and their relatively affordable prices. This revolution started to happen when producers in the Languedoc began to pull up high-volume, low-quality vines and replace them with the international varieties that are well known to virtually all wine consumers. Vines like Terret, which are capable of making very interesting wines, are now also being pulled up and replaced with the recognizable international varieties to meet the new demand for wines from this region. The problem with Terret isn't that it makes bad wines. No, the problem with Terret is that it is called Terret and, like it not, most consumers are only interested in buying wines made from grapes that they have heard of. Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay based wines will almost always outsell wines made from grapes like Terret, but, hopefully, there will also be some producers who are dedicated to preserving these unusual little vinous outposts for the more adventurous among us as well.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2010 Marc Roman Terret for the paltry sum of $7. As this post from another blog tells us, this wine was bottled by the Cellier Jean d’Alibert, a cooperative located in the Minervois region of the Languedoc. There is no indication given as to whether the wine itself is made from Terret Gris or Terret Blanc, though if I were a gambling man, I'd put money on Terret Gris. Given the large amount of space dedicated to his name on the label for this wine, you might be inclined to wonder just who Marc Roman is. Frankly, I have no idea. The importer's website says: "Marc Roman is the 'nickname' of our winemaker who lives among the vineyards of Southern France near Montpellier. 'Roman' hails to the Roman history of the vineyards in this part of France, still evident today in the many frescoes and ruins that can be found in the vineyards." The Marc Roman "winery" or whatever it is only makes two wines: this white Terret and a red made from Malbec grapes.

In the glass, this wine was a pale silvery gold color. The nose was nicely aromatic with ripe pear and melon fruits. It was pretty one-dimensional with the pear stealing the show, but that's somewhat understandable at this price point. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity. There were flavors of ripe pear, ripe apple, green melon and a touch of lemony citrus. In my notebook I wrote "pears, pears & more pears," which lines up pretty well with my memory of the wine as well. It represents a tremendous value at only $7 a bottle and will probably appeal most to fans of Pinot Grigio or other light, refreshing wines with a lot of up-front fruits.

Prieto Picudo - Castilla Y León, Spain

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:48:00 +0000

Prieto Picudo is not a very interesting grape. I know that's not the best way to get you interested in reading more about it, but as far as I can tell, it's the honest truth. The Wikipedia page for it is not only not informative and very short, but it was almost certainly written by either the winery whose bottle is shown in the picture or by some other kind of PR organization with a pretty shaky grasp on the English language. The entry in the Oxford Companion to Wine isn't much better (though, as you might expect, their English is impeccable). They tell us that the grape is grown on about 5,000 hectares of land around the city of León in northwestern Spain. Further, the grape is "unusual," "musky," and "light in color but very distinctive." It is permitted for use in the Tierra de León, Valles de Benavente, Valtiendas DO regions, but a good deal of the production is bottled under the Vino de la Tierra Castilla y León heading, which is essentially the Spanish equivalent to a Vin de Pays in France or an IGT in Italy. Why much of the wine is relegated to this lower quality rung is a question that isn't explored or answered.

Aside from that, there isn't much to say. A comment left on the VINEgeek site informs us that the word Prieto means "dark," referring to the fact that it is a dark-skinned grape, and Picudo means "peaked," which refers to the sharp taper at the bottom of the bunches. The always excellent Catavino adds that the grape is thought to be native to the León region of Spain and there are at least two clonal variants of Prieto Picudo: one with oval-shaped berries and one with round berries with the latter type being preferred for wine-making. Interestingly, that post from Catavino is from 2005 and the writer there seems pretty excited about the possibilities for Prieto Picudo given the wines that he tasted. In 2010, a different writer for Catavino was much less enthusiastic, saying in reference to six different Prieto Picudo based wines that he had recently tried: "To just about anyone, they were awful." To be clear, he wasn't slamming Prieto Picudo as a varietal, as he does say later in the pieces that he has had some good examples. His concern is more with the wineries, or at least the wineries represented in this particular tasting, and their improper treatment of the grape once it leaves the vine. Without knowing exactly which wines he tasted and exactly what their sin was, it's hard to come a judgement of one's own, though.

And that's about it. There is a shocking lack of up-to-date books on Spanish wine, and the only older book that I have (the 1999 edition of Julian Jeffs' The Wines of Spain) doesn't make any mention of Prieto Picudo at all. I've only seen wines made from the grape in one wine shop in the Boston area (Marty's in Newton) within the last year, but, weirdly, they had two different examples. The one that I bought was the 2006 Dominio Dostares "Estay" from Castilla Y León, and I paid about $16 for it. In the glass the wine was a fairly deep purple ruby color that was nearly opaque at the core. The nose was moderately aromatic with red cherry, strawberry and red berry fruit along with some baking spice, chocolate and smoke. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity and low tannins. There were flavors of red cherries and both stewed and fresh, brambly red berry fruit (as an aside, the tasting note "red berry fruit" makes me a little uncomfortable as I try to be as precise as I can, but sometimes I just have a vague sense of fruit that is red and berryish which doesn't announce its presence in a more assertive way, so "red berry fruit" it is). There was also a touch of baking spice and a kind of cedar-y woodiness as well. As it opened up, it picked up something that I've never really been able to put a name to, but which is always unwelcome in my glass. The closest I can come to describing it is that it tastes kind of like the strawberry flavor of those awful candies that Life Savers makes called Creme Savers. In my notes I write "strawberries and cream," but it's that artificial kind of cream that those candies had (or, similarly, like the artificial cream flavor in Cream Soda soft drinks). I've picked it up in red wines made from a variety of grapes, so I'm guessing it's something that happens during the winemaking process, but when it shows up, it's a total deal-breaker for me. This wine wasn't the worst offender that I've ever tasted, but that flavor was there. I'm willing to try another example of wine made from this grape from another producer, but I probably won't go out of my way to seek one out or pick one up.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Nielluccio, Sciacarello, Syrah and Grenache - Corse Calvi, Corsica, France

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Nielluccio Grapes

Hello and welcome to the third installment of the Weird Blend Wednesday series! Things have been a little tame around here lately as many of the grapes and wines that I've written about have been pretty straightforward, lacking any real mystery or controversy. I hope to shake things up a little bit today and talk about one uncontroversial grape, Sciacarello, and one that's a little more interesting, Nielluccio.

For many years, there was controversy and disagreement surrounding the Nielluccio grape, with the main point of contention centered around questions concerning its origins. One camp held that the grape was indigenous to the island of Corsica, while the other held that the grape was imported there from the Italian mainland during the time that it was under the control of the Genoese. Oz Clarke is purportedly a proponent of the former position (in his Grapes and Wines which was published several years back, so his position may have changed) while Jancis Robinson is a proponent of the latter, having recently switched over from the indigenous camp. In the beginning, both camps were arguing under the assumption that Nielluccio was a distinct grape variety that could not be found anywhere else. Later on, it was determined that Nielluccio was ampelographically identical to the Sangiovese grape, and many began to speculate that the grapes were either very closely related or, possibly, even identical (or clonally variant at least). To read the Wikipedia entry on Nielluccio, one would think that the debate is still raging and the answer is still to be determined. It is not.

A research group from Bologna, Italy, published a study in 2005 which compared the DNA of 39 registered Sangiovese clones as well as 34 "biotypes" of Sangiovese to the acknowledged "reference standard" of Sangiovese to see if there were any differences. The 39 clones all came back as identical both to one another and to the reference standard, while of the 34 biotypes, all but six were identical as well. Nielluccio was not one of the six, meaning that it is genetically identical to Sangiovese. Of the preceding argumentative positions regarding Niellucio, this finding really only completely discredits the one that holds that Nielluccio is indigenous to Corsica, since we know Sangiovese is not ultimately a Corsican grape. The theory that the Genoans brought it over at some point during their rule of the island is still a possibility, though, and is currently the most widely accepted explanation of Nielluccio's presence on Corsica, where, as of the year 2000, it was planted on about 1600 hectares of land, representing about 14% of the total plantings within Corsica.

Sciacarello Grapes

Sciacarello is a bit more straightforward. It is thought to be the same grape as the Mammolo that is grown in Tuscany and used as a minor player in both the Chianti and the Vino Nobile di Montepulciano blends. The Italian name Mammolo comes from the grape's purported aromatic similarity to violets, called mammole in Italian. It is generally regarded as the more interesting red Corsican specialty grape, but is only planted on a few hundred hectares of land throughout Corsica. There are a handful of varietal examples, but I haven't been able to find any to date.

I was unsure whether I would write about this wine or not since it is mostly comprised of relatively common grapes, but the fact that the wine was from Corsica was what finally swayed me. Corsican wine isn't incredibly rare, but it isn't exactly common either. Corsica itself is the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean, which, while it belongs politically to the French, is much closer to Italy both geographically and culturally. It is less than 7 miles north of Sardinia and 56 miles west of Tuscany, but is about 105 miles away from the Provençal coast of France. It was controlled by the Republic of Genoa for over 500 years, from the mid-13th Century until well into the 18th Century. The Genoans enacted strict rules on viticulture and viniculture and would not allow the Corsicans to ship their wine to any port outside of Genoa. The Corsicans struggled for their independence, and in 1755 proclaimed themselves sovereign as The Corsican Republic with the publication of the Corsican Constitution. The Genoans didn't really want to deal with this kind of trouble so in 1764 they secretly sold the island to France. The French slowly began to build up their presence on the island until 1768 when the Genoans openly announced that they were ceding the island to the French in perpetuity with no possibility of retraction. The Corsicans revolted at the news but were ultimately defeated and the island was officially annexed onto France in 1770. Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, in August of 1769, and one wonders how much differently history may have played out if Napoleon's home had not been transferred to France when it was.

The wine history of Corsica goes back thousands of years. It is thought that there may have been some indigenous vines on Corsica, but when the Phoenicians settled the island, they certainly brought many of their own vines from their other territories. Corsica came under Islamic rule around the 7th and 8th Centuries AD, and since the Islamic religion forbids the consumption of alcohol, the winemaking industry on the island suffered badly. It rebounded significantly under Genoan rule, becoming famous throughout the European world, but was still limited by the Genoans strict control over the entire industry. The Genoans definitely had the largest impact on the wine culture of the island, as can be seen in the wealth of Italian grapes that are still cultivated all over Corsica today. The government sought to expand the Corsican economy in the 19th Century by focusing on winemaking, but the plan was derailed severely with the onset of Phylloxera. When vines were finally replanted, many of them were planted to productive but bland French grapes like Carignan and Cinsaut and Corsica became a significant contributor to the European wine lake. The EU vine-pull subsidies of the 1980's were very successful in Corsica, eliminating about 7000 hectares of low-quality vines and putting the focus more on higher quality grapes like Nielluccio, Sciacarello, Vermentino and some of the international varieties.

The wine that I picked up was from the Calvi sub-region of the island, located in the extreme northwest corner near the town of Calvi (just north of Ajaccio, where Napoleon's family made wine). The soils here are predominantly schist with some granite. The island is generally warm and sunny with regular rainfall, but very little rain during August and September, which usually creates ideal conditions for harvest. The AOC rules stipulate that to qualify for the Corse Calvi designation, the finished wine must be made up of at least 50% Nielluccio, Sciacarello and/or Grenache together, while Barbarossa, Carignan, Cinsaut, Mourvedre, Syrah and Vermentino combined cannot account for more than 50% of the total blend with the further restriction that Vermentino and Carignan cannot make up more than 20% of the blend.

I picked up a bottle of the 2007 Domaine Maestracci "E Prove" Corse Calvi wine from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for about $17. The wine manager there told me the wine was about 1/3 Nielluccio, 1/3 Grenache, 1/6 Syrah and 1/6 Sciacarello. In the glass the wine was a fairly deep purple-ruby color. The nose was moderately aromatic with dusky black cherry and black plum fruits with some wet leather and cocoa powder. It was a very nice and appealing mixture of fruit and earth. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acid and some fairly serious tannins. There were flavors of bright red and black cherry fruit with some blackberry, smoke, leather and tobacco. Right after opening the fruits are predominantly red, but as the wine opens up they shift over to a darker, more brooding kind of character. The whole way through, though, the wine is marked by an excellent balance between its vibrant fruit and duskier earthy flavors all held together with a solid vein of acidity and tannic skeleton. The wine is enjoyable enough to drink on its own but it really does need food to truly show its stuff. Any red meat would be fine, while the acid means that it could stand up to fattier meats or sauces as well as tomato-based sauces. The wine is versatile enough where you really don't have to over-think the pairing and at only $17, you can buy a few bottles to have on hand anytime.

Noiret - Finger Lakes, New York

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:59:00 +0000

Today's post will be short and sweet because, well, there just isn't a whole lot to say about today's grape. It's called Noiret and it was released to the public for cultivation only in 2006. It was created and tested by two Cornell professors named Bruce Reisch and Thomas Henick-Kling at Cornell's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y. The original cross (between Steuben and NY65.0467.08) was made in 1973 and first planted in 1975. They started testing the grape for its winemaking abilities back in 1980 but final approval for commercial sale didn't happen until 2006. I don't think that the process for all hybrids and crosses takes quite that much time in general, but that does give you some idea of how arduous a task it can be to create new species of grapes.

The grape's family tree is unbelievably complex, but it is also more or less fully mapped out here. There are a number of familiar faces there as well as a lot of strings of numbers that probably won't mean anything to you unless you are yourself a grape breeder. They are basically grapes that have been bred at a breeding station but have not been released commercially. They have various characteristics that are useful for breeding, such as particular disease resistances or weather hardiness, but also have some other flaw that would prohibit their planting on a commercial scale. Noiret looks to have a very interesting mix of vinifera grapes, hybrid grapes and breeding specimens throughout its family tree.

Like most grapes that are bred at these breeding stations, Noiret was specially bred to have certain characteristics. It was certainly bred to have some degree of cold hardiness, and it is considered moderately hardy (meaning that the vines will likely survive in conditions between -5 and -15 degrees Fahrenheit). The only major disease problem listed for Noiret is a moderate susceptibility to downy mildew of the fruit and leaves, meaning that the grower would need to take care in conditions that are conducive to the spread of those fungi. It has a fairly late bud-break which means that spring frosts aren't really a concern. The big selling points for the grape are that it is able to impart a deep color to its wines and, best of all, it doesn't have any of the foxiness that can plague some hybrids.

There are some table wines being made from the Noiret grape, but when I was in the Finger Lakes region a few months ago, the only wine I was able to find was a Port-style wine from Red Newt Winery on Seneca Lake. It's from the 2007 vintage, which I guess either means that they are using very young Noiret grapes for this wine or they have access to vines that may have been planted prior to 2006. In any case, the blend is 73% Noiret, 20% Syrah and 7% Cabernet Franc and a 500 mL bottle set me back about $24 at the winery. In the glass the wine was a deep purple ruby color with a very narrow purple rim. The nose was moderately aromatic with raspberry and blackberry fruits, both fresh and dried, along with some chocolate and raspberry liqueur. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity, no tannins, a touch of sweetness and an obviously high alcohol content. There were flavors of cocoa powder, dried blackberry and black cherry, stewed raspberries, espresso and bittersweet chocolate. There was also a very distinctive raspberry liqueur flavor that was really dominating the palate. I found the alcohol a little awkward, mostly because the body really wasn't fleshy enough to prop up the Port alcohol levels. Overall I found it very enjoyable, though, and enjoyed my bottle with some homemade chocolate-raspberry clafoutis, which it turned out was an excellent pairing. I hope to be able to track down a table wine made from the grape before too long and will report back when I'm able.

Marechal Foch - Finger Lakes, New York

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:03:00 +0000

I'll confess that I have a bit of a soft spot for hybrid grapes. That's not the kind of admission that you can make in certain company, as the common consensus on hybrid grapes and the wine produced from them is that they are mostly forgettable curiosities made in places where people probably shouldn't bother trying to grow grapes at all. But that's part of their charm for me. I love that they allow people in unpleasant (or sometimes downright hostile) climates to grow grapes and make wine. Sure, you can argue that these wines aren't ever going to blow your mind, but you can also say that about 99% of the wine being made today anyway. Not every wine has to be amazing, after all, and if a wine can't be amazing, then I'd prefer that it at least be interesting. What I like about the hybrids is that even when the wine itself isn't all that interesting (and let's be honest, a lot of it really isn't), there's still a story behind it and how it came into existence. I realize that that kind of thing may excite me more than most, but I've learned to live with it.

Marechal Foch belongs to a group of grapes that are informally referred to as the French Hybrids. We've taken a look at a few of these hybrids and I've written fairly extensively about their history in my post on the Chambourcin grape, which interested readers are invited to peruse at their leisure. For those who are fanatical about the proper placement of diacritical marks, I do realize that the grape's proper French spelling is technically Maréchal Foch, but since the French have decided that they're too good for hybrid grapes, I've decided that the Americanized spelling is good enough for me.

Maréchal is the French word for "marshal" and the grape is named for a French general named Ferdinand Foch who was named Maréchal de France in 1918. Foch was also the Allied Supreme Commander in charge of all French, British and American armies in France during World War I. He was heavily involved in creating the armistice treaty that ended that war, though he was prescient enough to say at the time "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years." Foch himself didn't have anything to do with the creation of the grape that now bears his name. It was created in Alsace which, those of you who are up on your geography know, is located right on the border between France and Germany. Alsace has gone back and forth between the two countries several times. It was annexed by Germany in 1871 but France got it back after World War I (and later lost it prior to WWII, regaining it again after that war). The grape's creator, Eugene Kuhlmann, named it for the great French general as an homage.

Unusually for a hybrid grape, Marechal Foch's parentage isn't precisely known. Most hybrids are created in laboratory type conditions, so there is usually a lot of documentation for them, but, perhaps because of the precarious location of Alsace through World War II, the documentation for Marechal Foch isn't complete. Some believe that it is a product of a grape called Goldriesling (itself a cross between Riesling and Courtillier Musqué) and an unidentified vine that was itself a crossing between a v. riparia and a v. rupestris vine. Others believe that it is the offspring of Pinot Noir and a hybrid called Oberlin 595. Whatever the case, the grape was commercially introduced in France in 1920 and in the US in 1951, having come over from Canada. The vine yields small bunches of small grapes which are apparently virtually irresistible to birds. It is grown to some extent in the Loire Valley, though those grapes cannot legally be used for any commercial wine production. It does bud early and ripen fairly late, which you would think would make it unpopular in colder regions, but it is grown fairly successfully in Canada and in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

I picked up two wines made from the Marechal Foch grape while traveling in the Finger Lakes a few months back. The first wine that I picked up was from the Prejean Winery on the western shore of Seneca Lake. I bought their 2008 vintage Marechal Foch for about $12. In the glass the wine was an inky, opaque black color with a very narrow purple rim. The nose was moderately aromatic with juicy blackberry and blueberry fruit along with some smoky charcoal and chocolate and a touch of something meaty and savory. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and very low tannins. There were flavors of tart cherry, cranberry and blackberry fruit with a touch of smoke and bittersweet chocolate. The wine was really tart which was surprising given how rich and dark the nose was. I've noticed with quite a few of these hybrid grape wines that I find their aromatics very appealing, but ultimately find the wines themselves to be sour and a little thin. This wine definitely followed that pattern. I have in my notes that this was "all treble and no bass" and that seems like a pretty succinct summary of it. Even at a paltry $12, there isn't a lot in this wine to recommend it.

The second wine that I picked up was from Atwater Estates on the eastern shore of Seneca Lake. I bought their 2008 Maréchal Foch, French spelling and all, at the winery for about $24. In the glass the wine was a deep, inky purple ruby color. The nose was nicely aromatic with blackberry, black plum and black cherry fruit. There was a distinct meaty, gamy aroma that was really interesting. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and soft tannins. There were cherry and black plum fruit flavors with smoky, leather undertones. There was a slightly tart, slightly bitter cherry pit kind of finish to it. This wine was much deeper and darker than the Prejean and much more balanced overall. The plush fruits were nicely balanced by the smoky, leathery earthy components. The bitter finish was a bit too noticeable for my tastes, but overall I really enjoyed this wine. It's a little expensive for what it is, but it was the best varietal Marechal Foch that I had while I was in the Finger Lakes. This winery's tasting room is also a pleasure to visit and the pourer was funny and engaging. It's definitely one of those places and those wines that I'll definitely revisit when I come back to that region.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Petit Rouge, Cornalin, Mayolet & Vien de Nus, Valle d'Aosta, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:31:00 +0000

Mayolet Grapes

Hello, everyone and welcome back to Weird Blend Wednesday. Today's wine is a fun little field blend from the Valle d'Aosta that is made up of several different grapes that are specialties of the region. I think. See, this wine is sold as a vino da tavola, or, this close to the French/Italian border, a vin de table, which means that the only thing that the bottle can say is whether the wine is white or red, who made it and the name that the producer has decided to give to the bottling, if any (in this case, the wine is called Cuvé de la Côte). No vintage, geographical indication (other than the country of origin) or grape make-up is permitted on the bottle at all, which isn't usually a problem in this day and age since many producers just put that kind of stuff online and let the consumers find it themselves. For this wine, though, the only information available is from the distributor (the great Louis/Dressner) who only offers that the wine "is a field blend from a parcel of particularly old vines." There's really no telling exactly what is in this bottle, and it's possible that the winemaker may not even know, if the parcel is old enough. The guys at the Wine Bottega, where I picked this bottle up, said that it was most likely a blend of the four grapes mentioned above, and so that's what I'm going with.

Vien de Nus Grapes

We've already taken a good, long look at two of the four alleged grapes in this blend. Petit Rouge is the savage little grape that forms the base of the wines from the Enfer d'Arvier and Torrette sub-regions within the Valle d'Aosta. Cornalin is the confusing little grape that is a different thing depending on where you find yourself. If you're in Italy, you're probably talking about Cornalin d'Aoste, which is usually called Humagne Rouge in Switzerland. If you're in Switzerland, Cornalin refers to a different grape, known as Cornalin du Valais, which is actually one of the parents for Cornalin d'Aoste. It's a long, tangled story that you can peruse at your leisure via the link above.

The other two grapes are Mayolet and Vien de Nus. Mayolet is certainly the more common of the two grapes and can occasionally be found in varietal form, while Vien de Nus is pretty much a blending grape. Mayolet is referenced in writings dating back to the 18th Century and is thought to be indigenous to the Valle d'Aosta. Recent DNA testing has shown that Mayolet is one of the parents of Cornalin du Valais (Petit Rouge is the other), which means that both Petit Rouge and Mayolet are the grandparents of Cornalin d'Aoste. This wine, then, is kind of like a little family reunion in a bottle where Vien de Nus plays the role of a longtime neighbor who is like an honorary uncle, even though he isn't really related by blood to anyone there. Vien de Nus also has a long history in the Valle d'Aoste and is thought to be native to the region, but if there is any genetic link between it and the other three grapes in this wine, I haven't been able to find it.

The wine that I was able to try was made by Franco Noussan who lives in the village of St. Christophe in the hills above the town of Aoste. His bio on Louis/Dressner's site says that he works at the local university, which it turns out is the Institut Agricole Régional, the local agricultural school where the Cornalin and Prëmetta I wrote about earlier came from. His winery is essentially an extension of his garage which he dug into the hillsides around his house. He has several parcels scattered around St. Christophe including one with vines over 70 years old, which is where I presume the grapes for this wine came from. Altogether he farms about 5.5 hectares of land which he works without herbicides. He hand harvests all of his grapes and uses only indigenous yeasts in his fermentation. He has been making wine for his family and friends for many years but has only been offering them commercially since 2005.

I picked up my NV bottle of the Noussan Cuvé de la Côte from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $25. In the glass, the wine was a medium purple ruby color. The nose was very aromatic with black cherry, black plum and wild raspberry fruits with a touch of smoke. There was something wild and savage to the nose that was very interesting and deeply compelling. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and medium tannins. There were flavors of black cherry, dried cherry, wild raspberry and blackberry fruit with smoke, char and a little bit of funk. It was wild and complex but really nicely balanced as well. There was a good mixture of red and black fruits with nice charred, smoky undertones to it that was all held up with a lively vein of acidity. I really felt like the wine over-delivered in terms of complexity and depth for the price, especially since wines from the Valle d'Aoste tend to be fairly expensive because of their limited production. It would go well with all kinds of food but I think something with duck or sausage would be great as the bright acidity here would just cut through the fat and match well with meat that's a little funky.

Counoise - Vin de Pays du Gard, France and Lake County, California

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:24:00 +0000

Counoise is one of those grapes that you may have already had, though you might not be aware of it. It finds its way into wines in such small proportions that not only would the winemaker probably not bother to mention its inclusion on the wine's label, but even if they did, it would have been nearly impossible to really get a sense for what the grape tastes like. It is perhaps best known in the Châteauneuf-du-Pape region of France, where it is one of the thirteen varieties allowed in the region's red wines. Many Châteauneuf-du-Pape producers don't give any indication on their bottles what grapes and proportions are used in their wines, though, so it may be hard for one to say definitively whether there's any Counoise in a given bottle. Château Beaucastel is a famous exception as they are well known for using all thirteen varieties in their wine and, according to their website, their final blend typically contains about 10% Counoise. On the whole, though, the chances of a little Counoise ending up in your average Châteauneuf-du-Pape bottle aren't all that good. Less than 1% of the total vineyard area of Châteauneuf-du-Pape is planted to the Counoise grape. Counoise can also be found throughout some of the other regions of Southern France like Languedoc-Roussillon, but not in any significant numbers. In 2000, there were only about 1500 acres (about 640 hectares) planted to the grape in all of France.

Exactly where the grape ultimately came from isn't known, but there is a story that the grape may have come come into France via Spain. The story goes that a papal office made an offering of the grape to Pope Urban V during the period of time (the 14th Century) that the papacy was located in Avignon (whence Châteuneuf-du-Pape, or "the Pope's new castle," gets its name). The grape was spread throughout the region and used primarily as a blending grape until the late 19th Century when the Château la Nerthe estate began to use it more heavily. Their example wasn't followed by other producers, though, until Beaucastel decided to increase its presence in their blend.

It has never been a star in Châteauneuf-du-Pape (or anywhere, really), for a variety of reasons. The main reason is that it is only an average yielder so it never really caught on in the more productive regions of southern France in the way that Carignan did. Further, wine made from the grape oxidizes easily and lacks tannic structure, so it isn't really well suited to lengthy bottle aging. Since many Chateauneuf-du-Pape bottlings are made to undergo serious cellar time, extensive reliance on high doses of Counoise isn't really feasible. It does, however, provide nice acidity and a peppery kind of flavor that blends well with Grenache and Syrah, which has probably helped to keep it around in the Châteauneuf-du-Pape vineyards.

I was able to try two wines made predominantly from the Counoise grape. The first was the Domaine Monpertuis "Vignoble de la Ramiere" which I picked up locally for about $12. This estate is located within Châteauneuf-du-Pape, though the vineyard that these grapes come from must not be. It would be legal to bottle a 100% Counoise under the Châteuneuf-du-Pape AOC, but this wine is labeled as a vin de pays, which makes me think that it must fall somewhere outside the boundary. In the glass the winew as a medium purple-ruby color. The nose was nicely aromatic with wild strawberry and raspberry fruit along with some tea leaves and a kind of damp leafiness. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tannins. There were flavors of wild strawberry and stewed red berries along with some leather, wet leaves and chocolate. The wine was very berryish with an interesting leafy earthiness to it. It actually reminded me quite a bit of the Mencia grape from Spain. To go a little more mainstream, it was somewhere between a Loire Valley Cabernet Franc and a light Oregon Pinot Noir. Those looking for solid, red-berry fruit dominant red wines would be well-served checking this out as it represents a very nice value for only $12.

The second wine that I tried was the 2007 Jed Steele "Writer's Block" Counoise from Lake County, California. I picked this up over the Christmas holidays near my mother's home in South Carolina for about $17. There are a handful of California winemakers messing around with the Counoise grape and Jed Steele is one of them. This wine is about 90% Counoise with the remaining 10% coming from Grenache and Syrah grapes. The grapes come from a small parcel within the Jacobsen Vineyard owned by the Jed Steele estate. Those interested in the finer details of the wine-making process for this bottle are directed to the winery's website here. In the glass the wine was a fairly light ruby color. The nose was nicely aromatic with briary, brambly raspberry and blackberry fruit fruits with some black cherry and leather. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and fairly low tannins. There were flavors of black cherry and blackberry fruit with some charcoal, smoke, baking chocolate and cola. There was a bit of wild strawberry and spicy black pepper, but overall, the flavor profile on this wine was a bit darker than the French version, though it still had a wild, berryish kind of appeal. I found this version much more deep and interesting and felt that it definitely was worth the extra $5.

Non-Fizzy Glera (Prosecco) - Valdobbiadene, Veneto, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:04:00 +0000

Prosecco used to be so simple. If a bottle was labeled as Prosecco, you knew where it came from and what grape was used to make it because both went by the same name. There was only one DOC zone, Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene, whose rules stipulated that the wine made there had to be comprised of at least 85% Prosecco grapes. Since Prosecco was both a place and a grape, it was so easy to understand.

Leave it to bureaucrats and marketers, though, to come in and complicate a simple thing. In addition to the one DOC zone, there were also a handful of IGT regions located nearby that were able to use the word Prosecco on their labels because it was the official name of the grape used to make the wine. Fearing that consumers were too dumb to be able to figure out the difference between an IGT Prosecco wine and a DOC one, the authorities stepped in in 2009 with a new plan. The Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOC region was elevated to a DOCG and the former IGT regions were all elevated to DOC status. The Prosecco grape, though, would no longer officially be known as Prosecco, but would now be officially known as Glera (Glera has always been one of its synonyms, but Prosecco was by far the most common name for the grape). Further, only the Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOCG region can now use the name Prosecco since, by changing the grape's name, the authorities had turned Prosecco into a geographical designation rather than a viticultural one. The newly formed DOC regions have to use the name Glera if they want to refer to the grape that they use to make their wines.

So now we live in world where you go to Prosecco to drink Glera, which is a little confusing because the town central to the new DOCG is called Valdobbiadene, not Prosecco. There is a village called Prosecco, which is likely the source for the original name of the grape, but that village is in Friulia, near Trieste on the Slovenian border (where, oddly enough, they call the grape Glera). Some maintain that the grape is originally from there, while others believe it's from the Colli Euganei, about 30 miles south of Valdobbiadene, where the grape is known as Serpino, which is easily the coolest of the grape's synonyms. The grape's history in the area around Valdobbidene can be traced back to the early 19th Century, though some believe that the vinum pucinum mentioned by Pliny in Roman times may be a reference to the Glera grape, though as we've noted many times, tracing any modern grape back to Pliny is a difficult task.

All that is well and good, you may be saying to yourself, but is this Fringe Wine guy really trying to pass Prosecco off as an unusual grape just because it's now called something different? Well, no. I'm well aware that Prosecco is everywhere (even, apparently, in one of those Facebook games called CityVille), but that's fizzy Prosecco. The Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene DOC produced over 250 million bottles of wine in 2000, the overwhelming majority of which was either fully sparkling or frizzante. No, what I've found is a still wine made from the Glera grape, which is a rare bird indeed. The DOCG regulations do allow for the production of still wines, though very few producers bother as the fizzy stuff is what people really want. Prosecco sales have been on the rise, especially lately, as people are beginning to turn away from more expensive options like Champagne in these rough economic times. The method that makes Prosecco so much less expensive (the Charmat method) also tends to make the wines more fruit-forward with fewer of the bready, yeasty secondary flavors and aromas that mark traditional method sparkling wines. Prosecco is an easy drinking, crowd-pleasing kind of wine and the bubbles are a major part of that image for consumers.

While marketing is a big reason for the tiny production of still Glera-based wines, the perception of the grape as somewhat bland and uninteresting is certainly another. Bubbles, especially cheap bubbles, are a good way to put a little sauce on a dry steak, so to speak. Finally, Prosecco has, historically, almost always been a sparkling wine. The early history of the grape's cultivation reads an awful lot like that of the Mauzac grape. Prosecco ripens very late and so it doesn't go into the cellar for vinification until late fall or early winter. The wine usually wasn't finished with its fermentation before the temperatures dropped so low that the yeasts kind of fell asleep and stopped doing their work. The winemakers would bottle when the vats stopped bubbling and, since filtration wasn't a common practice, the sleeping yeast cells would be bottled along with the slightly sweet wine. When the temperatures warmed up, the yeasts woke up and carried on their work inside the bottle, expelling CO2 as they carried on, which didn't have anywhere to go inside the sealed bottle, and so was absorbed into the liquid, creating little bubbles. People liked this style and, through the years, Prosecco wines have become synonymous with bubbles.

The wine that I had, though, was the 2008 (prior to DOCG elevation and, thus, "just" a DOC wine) Adriano Adami "Giardino" Prosecco, which I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $18. This wine was 90% Glera and 10% Chardonnay and the grapes come from the Giardino vineyard, which the Adami family has owned since 1920. Most of the grapes grown on this site end up in a kind of prestige cuvée, but they specially select some for this still wine. The grapes are lightly pressed before being fermented in temperature controlled stainless steel where the wine stays on the lees for three months. In the glass the wine was a very light, almost clear silvery lemon color. The nose was fairly aromatic with green apples and lemon peel and just a hint of leesy funk. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acid. There were racy flavors of green apple and lemony citrus. This wine was definitely on the wrong side of its lifespan (the Adami website recommends drinking within a year of the vintage), but it was still holding together very nicely. It's simple and fruity with a really nice vein of acidity to hold it together. At $18, it's a bit steep, though, and there are much better values out there, though if you can find a fairly young version, I'd imagine that it's pretty tasty given how well it has held up over time.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Alvarelhão, Pedral & Vinhão - Vinho Verde, Portugal

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:44:00 +0000

Alvarelhão Grapes

Today I'm debuting a new feature that I like to call Weird Blend Wednesday, where I take a look at a wine I've tried that is a blend of several different unusual grapes. As a general rule, I usually like to stick with varietal wines for this site, but sometimes I come across something that is full of really interesting grapes that I just can't pass up. The problem is that they don't really fit in with the format that I've been working with over the past year or so, so I end up either not drinking them, which is no fun at all, or drinking them and staring at the tasting note for months with no idea how to incorporate it into the site. So, if I have a wine that is made up of three or more different grapes and it isn't clear whether one of the grapes in the wine makes up at least 50% of the total blend, then I'll relegate it to this little corner of the blog. Welcome, friends, to Weird Blend Wednesday.

Today's featured wine is from the Vinho Verde region of Portugal, which we've taken a brief look at before when we talked about the Espadeiro grape. As mentioned in that post, Vinho Verde is a wine region in northern Portugal. Many of the wines that are made there are light, spritzy white wines that are so prevalent that many people think that Vinho Verde refers to that particular style of wine rather than the region, but wines from Vinho Verde come in all different colors and styles, from light spritzy whites to deep brooding reds. Today's wine is somewhere in between. Like the Espadeiro I wrote about previously, this was a rosé wine made from a blend of three different grapes: Alvarelhão, Pedral and Vinhão. Like many Portuguese wines, I can't find any indication either on the bottle or online about how much of the blend each grape makes up, so this wine is the perfect bottle to kick off Weird Blend Wednesday.

Pedral Grapes

Alvarelhão is a red skinned grape that is currently grown on less than 500 hectares of land within Portugal. It is one of the many permitted grapes in the Port blend, though it is usually little more than a bit player. Its main synonym within Portugal is Brancelho, and it is known in Galicia, just over the Spanish border, as Brancellao. It's not a particularly productive grape, but it makes up for it by being resistant to extreme temperatures and bad weather, which is helpful in the wet Vinho Verde region. It is thought to be native to the Dão region of Portugal.

Pedral is also a red-skinned grape that is grown both in Spain, particularly in Galicia where it is known as Pedral, and Portugal, where it can often be found under the names Padral or Cainho. It's grown mostly in the Monção sub-region of Vinho Verde, where it is one of the recommended varieties for planting, but it may actually be Spanish in origin. It's pretty hard to say. There isn't a whole lot of information out there about this particular grape.

Vinhão Grapes

Vinhão is more commonly found under the names Souzão or Sousão, depending on where you are. It is thought to be native to the Minho region of Portugal, which is in the extreme northwest corner of the country. It is also one of the approved Port grapes, where, when it is used at all, it is prized for the deep color that it can provide to the wine. While Portugal is the grape's native home, most of the world's plantings are found in the New World. Australia uses the grape for their own take on Port while California and South Africa are also in the Vinhão business, presumably for its coloring effects, as wine made from the grape is not generally held in much esteem. It seems that we'll get a chance to see if that's true before too long, as I have a Spanish bottle of wine made from the Souson grape which, according to the VIVC, is none other than Vinhão.

The wine that I tried which was made from these grapes was the 2009 Muralhas de Monção (which means "the walls of Monção") Vinho Verde rosé, which I picked up for about $9. The wine is made by the Adega Coop. Regional de Monção, which is a massive collection of over 1,700 growers who farm about 1,200 total hectares of land spread between the Monção and the Melgaço regions of Vinho Verde. The co-op was established just south of the town of Monção in 1958 and only had about 25 growers at the time. The grapes are hand-harvested and vinified in stainless steel tanks. In the glass, the wine had a medium salmon pink color with just a little bit of effervescence. The nose was fairly aromatic with strawberry and grapefruit with some grapefruit peel and a slight grassy kind of herbaceousness to it. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity and just a touch of effervescence. There were bright strawberry and watermelon fruit flavors with a touch of pink grapefruit as well. The wine was simple, fresh and fruity. If you can picture a zippy Sauvignon Blanc mixed with a bright, fruity rosé, that would be a good comparison for what this wine was like. It's a great summer wine that is really hard to beat for the money. Plus, how often do you get to cross off three different grapes from your Wine Century Club application for only $9?

Pineau d'Aunis - Coteaux du Vendômois, Loire Valley, France

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Pineau d'Aunis is a grape whose many names can give the illusion of familiarity. Its most common name, Pineau d'Aunis, puts one in mind of the Pinot family of grapes, which it is related to only linguistically, as there is no genetic relationship between the Pinot family and Pineau d'Aunis that I am aware of. Both Pinot and Pineau come from the French word for "pine" because the bunches of grapes supposedly looked like pine cones to those who were naming them (think of Pignolo or Pignoletto in Italy). The d'Aunis part of the grape's name comes from the Prieure d'Aunis, a monastery located near the Saumur region of the Loire Valley. It is thought that the grape was first "discovered," or, more accurately, selected for by the monks there.

Many local growers throughout the Loire Valley also refer to the grape as Chenin Noir, suggesting some kind of relationship to the Chenin Blanc grape that has made so many areas of the Loire Valley famous. Confusingly enough, one of the alternate names for Chenin Blanc is Pineau de la Loire, which certainly might make one wonder about the relationship between the two grapes. Wikipedia has it that Chenin Blanc is a mutation of Pineau d'Aunis, but if you follow the source cited for that bit of information, you can see that there is no such claim made in the original material and, further, that the source material makes no reference to the Pineau d'Aunis grape at all. The common consensus seems to be that Chenin Blanc and Pineau d'Aunis are, in fact, completely unrelated, and the Chenin name common to the two of them comes from a site known as Mont Chenin in the Loire Valley where the Chenin Blanc grape was planted by the Lord of Chenonceaux in the 15th Century. The Chenin name most likely got moved over to the Pineau d'Aunis grape at a time when its plantings were as significant as those of Chenin Blanc in some areas of the Loire Valley and many farmers began to refer to the grapes as Chenin Blanc and Chenin Noir for convenience's sake.

DNA analysis would clear the whole matter up, but it would seem that no one has bothered to give it a try. Which is too bad, really, because the grape is old enough and has been in the region for long enough that there may be some interesting discoveries to be had. It's said that Henry III of England was a fan of the wine and had it imported in from France in the mid 13th Century. Apparently the English ruled over Anjou, located in the Loire Valley, for a few decades before Henry III came into power and Henry tried, in vain, to bring the region back under English rule throughout his reign. I doubt that Pineau d'Aunis wine had too much to do with Henry's motivations, given the extraordinarily complex web of political intrigue throughout Western Europe at the time, but it certainly could have played some role. Wars have been waged for far less important reasons than a barrel or two of wine.

Today, it would be a wild exaggeration to call Pineau d'Aunis a "wine for Kings." I'm not entirely sure what the reason for the grape's ultimate decline was, but my guess is that the white wines of the Loire Valley began to gain in popularity and profitability at some point and many growers pulled up their red grapes in favor of the twin darlings of the Loire Valley, Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc. As of the year 2000, there were fewer than 1000 acres (about 430 hectares) planted to Pineau d'Aunis, most of which ends up as an anonymous minority component in some Loire Valley red or rosé wine. You're most likely to find it as a varietal wine in the Coteaux du Vendômois, which is around the center of the Loire Valley (from east to west), just north of Vouvray. Most wine made under this appellation is rosé, and I was able to find two examples in this particular style. There are also a handful of producers who make red wines that are all or nearly all from the Pineau d'Aunis grape, and I was able to try one of those bottlings as well. Finally, there are some people who are just doing crazy things with the grape, and from one of those producers I was able to find a fully sparkling white wine made from Pineau d'Aunis grapes.

The first bottle that I was able to find was the Domaine Brazilier Pineau d'Aunis rosé from the Coteaux du Vendômois AOC which I picked up for about $17. If my bottle had a vintage, I wasn't able to locate it. In the glass, the wine was a very pale salmon pink color. The nose was moderately aromatic with aromas of fresh cut watermelon and strawberry fruit. On the palate, the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity. There were light, delicate flavors of strawberry, raspberry and watermelon fruit with a touch of herbaceousness to it. Given the price tag on this wine, I was a little disappointed in how straightforward and simple the aroma and flavor profiles were. I don't generally buy rosé wines with the expectation that they are going to be much more than fruity and refreshing, but once I pass a certain price threshold, I do begin to expect a little more out of a wine. At nearly $20 per bottle, I feel that this probably should have been more complex and interesting than it was. It's entirely possible that this wine was past its prime, but without a vintage date, it's hard to say. Since there are other examples of this grape in this style for much less money, I'd advise caution with this particular bottling at this price point.

The second rosé that I was able to try was the Cave Cooperative du Vendômois bottling from the Coteaux du Vendômois AOC which I picked up for about $10. As you can see on the label, the wine is labeled as "Lieu-dit Cocagne," which I believe means that the grapes came from a specific parcel of land referred to as Cocagne, though I don't have any idea what or where that is. The wine is made by a cooperative comprised of 25 growers and about a dozen different winemakers who, together, farm about 160 hectares of land, about 50 of which are devoted to the Pineau d'Aunis grape. In the glass, the wine was a pale pink color. The nose was very aromatic, dominated by pink grapefruit and fresh strawberry fruits. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with high acidity. There were flavors of watermelon, pink grapefruit and grapefruit peel with a touch of grassy herbaceousness that put me in mind of Sauvignon Blanc. The wine had the kind of wonderfully clean, minerally finish to it that makes you keep reaching for the glass.. This wine was beautifully perfumed with deep, pure fruit flavors and an electric nerve of acid that kept it bright and refreshing. THIS is the kind of rosé that I love to drink and at only $10 a bottle, it's really an incredible value.

The next wine that I tried was the 2010 Olivier Lemasson "Poivre et Sel" bottling from Touraine in the Loire Valley. I picked this bottle up from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $20. I've read online that this wine is 50/50 Pineau d'Aunis and Gamay, but the bottle says"Pineau d'Aunis...un peu de Gamay," which my high school French tells me means there's just a little bit of Gamay in it (the importer website says it is 90/10, which is probably the more accurate figure). The Poivre and Sel ("pepper and salt") is a reference to the fact that many people find a peppery aroma and flavor in the Pineau d'Aunis grape which the winemaker believes is perfectly complemented by a little Gamay as the salt to Pineau's pepper. In the glass, this wine was a fairly light purple-ruby color. The nose was moderately aromatic with plummy, cherryish fruits and a bit of that natural wine funk. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tannins. There were flavors of juicy, tart red cherry and red berry fruit and, yes, a hint of pepper. There was also a touch of tart cranberry and horsey funk on the finish. This wine had a nice balance of bright and juicy fruit with just enough earthy funk to keep it interesting. I found it somewhat similar to the Grolleau that I wrote about a few months back. Is it worth $20 a bottle? If you're looking for an upscale alternative to Beaujolais or are looking for a conversation piece to have at a dinner with friends, then yes, I think the price is fair.

I've saved the most interesting bottle for last. The final Pineau d'Aunis that I tried was the NV Jean-Pierre Robinot "Les Annes Folle" sparkling Pineau d'Aunis that I picked up from the Wine Bottega for about $30. Robinot has two lines of wine that he makes: the "Domaine de L'Ange Vin," which are made from his own grapes, and the "L'Opéra des Vins" which are made from grapes he buys from other local growers. This bottle is in the latter category. The wine about 80% Pineau d'Aunis and 20% Chenin Blanc. In the glass, the wine was a bronze-gold, almost russet kind of color that was very fizzy and slightly cloudy (the method used here is méthode ancestrale, like in our old friend Mauzac). The nose was fairly reserved with some green and baked apple aromas with a bready, yeasty kind of undercurrent. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with high acid and a lot of bubbles. I was expecting this to be closer to frizzante, but the bubbles were pretty serious and vigorous. The flavor profile was yeasty and bready with some tart apple fruit that was almost a little cidery and just a touch of pastry dough. The secondary flavors and aromas were much more noticeable than the fruits here, so if you're looking for something like Prosecco or Moscato d'Asti, keep looking. I'm conflicted about this wine because on the one hand, it's a really cool and interesting wine, but on the other, it's hard to say if it's tasty enough to really warrant the $30 price tag. I personally enjoyed it, but it's not going to be for everyone. I would guess if you've read this far, you probably already know whether this is something you'd be really into or really afraid of, so I guess you should just follow your gut.

Nerello Mascalese - Sicily, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:20:00 +0000

If Nerello Mascalese was a person, it would have a serious little-brother complex. It's never been considered the greatest grape in Sicily and has been greatly overshadowed for many many years by the Nero d'Avola grape. Nero d'Avola was itself little known outside of Sicily until not that long ago, but now it is hands down the most well-known and well-regarded Sicilian grape, especially among the red varieties.

It's difficult to talk about Nerello's recent presence in our lives and on our shelves without talking a little about the Nero d'Avola effect. For a long, long time, Sicily was not regarded as a place for fine wine production by most of the world. They grow a ton of grapes all over Sicily, but the overwhelming majority of the juice from those grapes ends up in bulk wine production or at the distillery. Of course there were people on the island who were interested in making fine wines and who, for the most part, were succeeding in that task, but they were small voices in a loud crowd, so to speak, and the reputation of Siclian wines overall was still not that great in spite of their successes. They could have tried to do what a number of different regions have done and decide to try their hand with the International grape varieties, which do grow well and flourish in the Sicilian climate, but if they had gone that route and tried to compete with the great wine regions of the world, I suspect they probably wouldn't have succeeded. Cabernet from a region known for cheap wines is still just cheap Cabernet and that identification with mass-produced, cheap wines is a difficult barrier to pass.

What they really needed was something that would separate and differentiate them from the other wine regions of the world. They found that something in the Nero d'Avola grape. The story is similar to the phenomenon of Australian Shiraz or Argentine Malbec. The Aussies didn't have an original product, but they had a different name for it that made it stand out from the other bottles on the shelf. Argentina wasn't the only place making wines from the Malbec grape, but they were the only ones doing it in quantities that would make the wines easily accessible to nearly every consumer. The trick was finding a little niche in the market that wasn't adequately filled by some other region and making the case that what you were filling that niche with was not only exciting and interesting, but was really only available from you, which is of course not true with Syrah or Malbec, but the marketing machines convinced a lot of people that it was. The great thing about Nero d'Avola for the Sicilians was that they didn't even really have to spin it. Nero d'Avola is only grown in Sicily and is only available from Sicilian winemakers. They had a real, original wine to offer.

These wines were new and interesting, but they were also well made and tasty. Consumers flocked to these wines because they were something different, but they stuck around because the wines were actually pretty good. Even though the overwhelming majority of wine made in Sicily is still bulk (only 5% ultimately ends up in bottle and only 2% of that is DOC classified), those winemakers who were interested in reaching a different demographic had finally found their in-road with the Nero d'Avola grapes. Consumers were now willing to buy and drink not only wines made from Nero d'Avola, but also wines from Sicily in general. The tide rose and raised a lot of ships, which, finally, brings us to our featured grape, Nerello Mascalese. Nerello and many of the other interesting Sicilian grapes are traveling the path blazed by the success of the Nero d'Avola grape.

There are actually two different Nerellos. Mascalese is the more common of the two and is named for the plain of Mascali at the base of Mt. Etna, the Sicilian volcano that has really been the epicenter for quality wine production within Sicily. The other Nerello is called Cappuccio, though I'm not sure why. The two are almost always blended together since they tend to have complimentary characteristics. One is lighter in color but higher in tannins while the other has deep color but low tannins. I'm not sure which contributes which, and there is no real consensus about which of the two grapes is considered superior. The important thing to remember is that they usually travel together and when they do, you're much more likely to see a higher proportion of Mascalese in the blend than Cappuccio.

The grape has been grown around Mt. Etna for at least 200 years. It does well on the volcanic soils and can be especially nice when grown on higher altitude sites on the volcano. Despite the fairly long established history and the lack of similar grapes in any other region, Nerello is probably not native to Sicily. A study done in 2008 found that Nerello Mascalese is almost certainly the offspring of the Sangiovese grape and some other unidentified parent, meaning that it probably came over from the Italian mainland at some point. This puts Nerello in some interesting company, as the same study also found that Frappato and Gaglioppo, among others, had the same kind of relationship to Sangiovese, meaning that all of those grapes are at least half brothers with one another.

I was able to find a handful of different bottles of Nerello representing several different styles and philosophies. The first wine that I tried was a NV Casa Fondata Valdo that I picked up at Bauer Wine and Spirits for about $13. This is actually made in the Prosecco region of Italy from Prosecco grapes (also known as Glera) and Nerello grapes or juice that they bring up from Sicily. There's minimal skin contact with the Nerello grapes, so there's very little color, and the wine made in the Charmat method, as is most Prosecco, so it's much fruitier than your typical Champagne method sparkler. In the glass the wine was a pale salmon pink color that was nice and fizzy. The nose was fairly aromatic with bright, fruity strawberry and green apple aromas. On the palate, the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity and nice bubbles. There were flavors of strawberry and raspberry candy with snappy green apple backing it up. This is all fruit and is as simple as it can be, but it's nice and tasty and is something that's definitely a little bit different. I'm sure Prosecco has some great food matches, but I always just like to drink it on its own and have a little fun with it. For $13, it's really hard to go wrong.

The next wine that I picked up was the 2008 Nicosia Nerello Mascalese that I grabbed from my friends at Bin Ends for about $10. It's more representative of the kind of everyday table wine you may find at your local wine shop. In the glass, the wine was a fairly light ruby color. The nose was nicely aromatic with red cherry and smoke aromas along with some stewed red berries. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acid and low tannins. There were flavors of sour cherry and redcurrant fruit along with some dried herbs and chocolate on the finish. As the wine opens up, the fruit flavors move away from the red end of the spectrum towards the black with more black cherry, black plum, smoke, chocolate and baking spice showing up. It's a good, solid, Italian food wine that would be great with anything with a tomato sauce or with some braised red meats. At $10 a bottle, it's a good, solid value wine that isn't going to blow you away, but is going to be well-made, well-structured and well-suited to a variety of different kinds of food.

The final wine that I'll be talking about is probably the most interesting and the most divisive. A few weeks ago, my friends over at the Wine Bottega put on a tasting of the wines from Frank Cornelissan, the Madman of Etna. The Cornelissan estate is really serious about the concept minimal intervention in the vineyard and in the winery and they take it about as far as it can go. The wines made by Frank Cornelissan come as close as wine can come to that line that separates wine as a beverage from vinegar as a condiment. They go into their philosophy in some detail on the website linked above and I encourage you to read what they have to say.

The estate makes three different red wines ranging in price from about $27 to about $150. Each wine at each price point is made from grapes harvested at a certain altitude on the slopes of Mt. Etna with the most expensive wines made from grapes grown at the highest elevations. The guys at the Bottega were nice enough to let us sample all of the different cuvees and even opened a few bottles from previous vintages that they had been squirelling away. I ended up buying a bottle of the Contadino 8, which is the bottom of the line cuvee, for about $27. There is no vintage on the wine and the number is an indication of how many times he's made that particular cuvee before. This is the 8th incarnation of the Contadino blend, which is mostly Nerello Mascalese, but it would be something of a fool's errand to try and figure out exactly which grapes are in this bottle. The wine is unsulfured and unfiltered so I had to store it in the fridge upright until I was ready to drink it, at which point I took it out and let it come to room temperature over 24 hours. I then very carefully decanted the wine twice to leave as much sediment behind as possible (when I did get some sediment, it was fairly bitter, so avoid it if you can). In the glass, the wine is a light ruby red color that is more serious than a rosé but less dark than you'd expect from a red wine. The nose was nicely aromatic with bright red cherry and candied cherry fruits and damp, forest floor kind of aroma. In the glass, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of red cherry, wild raspberry, wild strawberry, black tea and damp leaves. The wine develops with incredible speed as it sits in the decanter in the glass and the bright red flavors get darker and duskier. It reminded me a lot of some of the Trousseau from the Jura that I had or even of really funky Burgundy. It's a wild, savage wine that is really unlike anything I've ever had before. It's hard to recommend it unequivocally to people, as it is certainly not going to be everyone's kind of thing, but if you're looking for a weird, wild, different kind of wine adventure, give something in the Cornelissan line a shot.

Schioppettino - Colli Orientali del Friuli, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:27:00 +0000

In many ways, the story of the Schioppettino grape is the story of a lot of the grapes that I've written about on this site. It's a grape that enjoyed a degree of popularity at some point in the distant past, and then, for one reason or another, was on the brink of extinction. It has enjoyed some limited success and a few new plantings in more recent years, but, on the whole, it's still little known outside of a handful of regions. While the outline of the story may seem familiar to longtime readers, it's always the details that make an individual story worth telling. After all, if we rejected out of hand all stories with similar structures and outlines, then writers would have had to give up their craft thousands of years ago and the modern entertainment industry would have had to fold up shop before it even got off the ground (though whether this would have been such a bad thing is something you can ponder at your leisure).

So what are the details of Schioppettino? For starters, it's a very old grape. There are written records that reference the grape as far back as 1282 AD when the wine was used in a Slovenian wedding ceremony. It's thought that the grape may be native to Slovenia, or at any rate to some area around the Italian-Slovenian border. One of its synonyms is Ribolla Nera, indicating that it may be a dark-skinned mutation of or at least a relative of the Friulian/Slovenian grape Ribolla Gialla, though I can't find any indication of just what the specific relationship between the two grapes may be. I would hazard a guess that since Schioppettino is the more common name, the relationship between it and Ribolla Gialla may be merely linguistic, but I would love to read about it if anyone has done the genetic research. There are a few different explanations for the use of the Schioppettino name. Some say that it comes from the Italian word scioppare, which means "to burst," while others say it comes from schioppettare which means "to crackle." In either case, the bursts or crackles are a reference to a version of the wine that is made locally and sold very young with some residual CO2 in it, leaving small, snappy bubbles behind that crackle on the tongue.

As mentioned above, Schioppettino was, at one time, in danger of disappearing completely. Like so many grapes throughout the world, Schioppettino was almost done in by the scourge of phylloxera that swept through Europe's vineyards in the mid 19th Century. Many grape growers who found their vineyards decimated saw the plague as an opportunity to start fresh, and when it came time to replant, they often opted for less finicky and higher yielding vines, but in the case of Schioppettino, fashion was the force that nearly drove it into extinction. Many of the growers in Friuli had their sights set on international markets rather than just local ones and so they replanted many of their vineyards to the classic French varieties of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Sauvignon Blanc, among others. Plantings of the grape were so scarce after phylloxera that it was not included as an authorized variety in any of the DOC or EU regions until 1978, when the EU stepped in and issued a decree authorizing (or possibly just encouraging) the use of the grape in the Udine province of Friuli, which most sources credit as the act that saved the grape from oblivion. Plantings have risen over the past few decades to the point that the grape is no longer thought to be at risk for extinction, but certainly not to the point where it is widely available or well-known.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2008 Azienda Agricola Grillo (not to be confused with the Grillo grape) Schioppettino from the Colli Orientali del Friuli region of Italy at Central Bottle for about $23. In the glass the wine was a fairly deep purple-ruby color. The nose was nicely aromatic with rich black cherry and blackberry fruit backed by chocolate. It wasn't all that complex, but it was pure delight to smell. In the glass the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and soft, silky tannins. There were flavors of rich black cherry, blackberry and blueberry fruit with nice earthy chocolate and vanilla undertones. The fruit here was pure, focused and right up front in the flavor profile but backed by excellent structure and a soft, smooth kind of earthiness. The flavor profile wasn't particularly varied or complex but the flavors were deep and powerful without coming across as jammy or sweet. For $23, I thought this wine was an excellent value and I wouldn't hesitate to buy not only this bottle again, but I also wouldn't hesitate to buy any wine made from this grape. I am very curious about the frizzante wines made from this grape and see that there are some bubbly Schioppettinos imported into the US so I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for any of those.

Blatterle - Alto Adige, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:36:00 +0000

I live for wines like the one I'll be writing about today. It's a wine made from a very unusual grape that is grown in a very small region of Italy and, essentially, vinified by pretty much only a single producer. We've taken a look at a few wines like this in the past. The Roscetto from Lazio and the Casetta from the Veneto are both similar in terms of their obscurity. While I love to find wines like these, it can be a real pain to try to write about them. When you pass a certain point of obscurity, doing the research for a blog post becomes a real struggle. For most of my posts, the real challenge is in sifting through all the information I have to try and find the most interesting parts that I can write about. With some grapes, though, the challenge becomes trying to find any information at all about them. The grapes mentioned above, as well as today's grape, Blatterle, are not mentioned in any books that I have (aside from a passing mention of Casetta in Bastianich and Lynch's Vino Italiano) and are not heavily referenced online either. My life gets a lot more difficult once I go diving past a certain level of obscurity and find myself in the murky waters of the virtually unknown.

I mention in the Casetta and Roscetto posts linked above that all of the information available about those particular grapes comes from the people who are selling you the bottle, which always makes me a little uneasy. With Blatterle, the person who is growing the grapes and making the wine doesn't really have much of an online presence, so we are denied even that much access. In this case, the source of most of the information is the importer of the wine, Louis/Dressner, whose founder Joe Dressner sadly passed away just a few months back. I feel a little better about using the importer (this one in particular) rather than the winery itself as the primary source partly because the importer has a good reputation within the wine community, but mostly because the content of their site, or at least the part dealing this grape, is very factually oriented, and if it's a sales pitch, it's one of the driest ones I've ever come across. That sounds like a dig, but it's actually a really good thing in my opinion. I'm a "just the facts" kind of person and am much more interested in winery sites that sound more like an encyclopedia than like a commercial.

Here is essentially what we know about Blatterle. It is an old variety that is thought to be native to the Isarco River Valley in the Alto Adige. The name Blatterle means "little leaf" in German (remember that the Alto Adige region is a weird kind of mixture of German and Italian cultures), which, I guess, means that this vine may have smaller than average leaves. They say that the grapes themselves are kind of oval-shaped and golden colored, but I don't see it in the pictures that I was able to find. It seems that historically the grape was used either for grape juice production or in the production of a lightish, everyday kind of wine.

The grape is grown pretty much exclusively by the Mayr-Nusserhof estate, which is located near (or possibly in) the city of Bolzano on the Isarco River. The family who owns the estate are named Mayr while there are conflicting reports about where the Nusserhof comes from. The importer says that it's a reference to some hazelnut trees (Nuss is the German word for nut) that used to surround the house but which were cut down as the city of Bolzano has impinged further and further on the Mayr family's spread, which is currently about 2.5 hectares of organically farmed land. A shop in North Carolina presents the alternate theory that one of the current owner's relatives, a man named Josef Meyr Nusser, had the street named after him because of his actions in World War II, where his opposition to the Nazi regime led him to become a conscientious objector when the Nazis were recruiting soldiers from his occupied town. As you might imagine, the Nazis weren't especially kind to opposition of any sort and Josef died in a concentration camp as a Catholic martyr. The second story is not only much better, but is actually more plausible, so that's the one I'm going to choose to believe.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2007 Nusserhof "Blaterle" from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $23. You may notice that the name of the wine is "Blaterle" rather than Blatterle. Since the Blatterle grape is not approved for use in any DOC wine, the winery bottles this as a Vino da Tavola, which has the restriction that you cannot print a place name, grape name or vintage on the label of the wine. Just by dropping one of the T's in the middle of the word, the winery is able to dodge these restrictions (the vintage is hidden at the bottom of the label where it says L07, the last two numbers being the last two digits of the vintage year). In the glass the wine was a pale greenish lemon color. The nose was fairly reserved with some pear fruit and something slightly nutty. As the wine approached room temperature, there was something vaguely floral that started to show up, but never in any serious amount. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium to low acidity. The wine had a very minerally flavor profile with some lean pear fruit and lemon peel, but not a whole lot. This wine was probably on the wrong end of its life span and was suffering slightly for it. It's interesting to compare my tasting notes with Jakob's Bowl who did his tasting a little over a year after I did and with a bottle that was one vintage year newer. My bottle lacked the explosive floral notes that his had and mine had definitely picked up more pithy citrus in the bottle. I'm interested in trying a younger version and will keep my eyes peeled and fingers crossed.

Pigato - Riviera Ligure di Ponente, Ligura, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:47:00 +0000

Today marks Fringe Wine's first foray into the tiny region of Liguria in Italy. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, with today's post, Fringe Wine will have covered a wine from each of the individual regions within Italy. Liguria is the last to be covered not because they lack interesting wines, but because they make so little of them and export even fewer. Liguria is next-to-last in vineyard area and total volume of production within Italy, ahead only of the Valle d'Aosta. When you look at a map of Italy, it's pretty easy to see why. Liguria is a tiny region in northwestern Italy, right below Piemonte, that forms a narrow band that just wraps above the Ligurian Sea. The landscapes here are dramatic, as there are steep hillsides and mountains that begin sometimes right at the shoreline and stretch back into Piemonte. So what you have is an area that isn't that big to begin with that has very difficult ground to work, which results in a relatively small amount of wine being made. Further, Liguria is a tourist haven, given their long shoreline and dramatic vistas, so much of the wine that is made locally is also consumed locally either by tourists or by the Ligurian natives.

I've been reading a lot about Italian wine over the past year or so, and have been eagerly seeking out some wines made from the unique grapes that are found in Liguria. I've managed to pick up a few that we'll get around to in the near future, but for today, I want to talk about a grape called Pigato. Pigato was probably the first Ligurian grape that I was able to try, though the first bottle that I bought was well past its prime. It took me a few months, but I was able to find a replacement and I've been eagerly anticipating writing about this grape for a little while now. I started flipping through some of my books to start my research off and noticed that there seems to be some controversy about just where Pigato may have come from, which started to get me even more excited since I just love those kinds of controversies. And then I went to the Oxford Companion to Wine, who says that "DNA profiling showed that pigato and vermentino, both long-established in Liguria, and Favorita, cultivated in Piemonte, are all identical."

My heart sank. There were all these great stories about how maybe Caesar's legions planted the grape in Liguria or that maybe the grape came over from Greece or maybe how it might have something to do with Arneis, but it didn't look like any of them were true. The Oxford Companion doesn't cite their sources within the text, so I had to do some digging to find the article that they were referencing, and sure enough, in a study published in 1995, the proof was found. The study itself was done to see whether microsatellite sequence-tagging was an effective method of differentiating between cultivars, and it turns out that it is (in fact, nearly all DNA testing to determine relations between grapes use some form of microsatellite tagging these days). The scientists took several different grape varieties grown in both Italy and Australia and ran them through the test to see whether the different varieties could be distinguished from one another and, further, whether the clonal variants from the geographically disparate regions would show up as the same grape. Both tests were successful, but buried within the paper is the fact that in the course of the testing, Pigato, Vermentino and Favorita all tested as genetically identical, meaning essentially that they are clonal variants of the same grape.

It has long been suspected that Pigato has some relationship to Vermentino, with a few people believing that they may actually be the same grape, but the Italian officials currently recognize them as separate grapes (and, further, recognize Favorita as a separate grape as well). I don't know if this has always been the case, as Nicolas Belfrage, in his Barolo to Valpolicella, mentions that there is reference to a grape called vermentino pigato, or spotted Vermentino, in a book called Bollettino Ampelografico published in 1883. It kind of sounds like what may have happened is that there was a mutation of Vermentino at some point that had splotchy pigmentation on its skin which was then separated and cultivated on its own, but was still recognized as a variant of Vermentino (much like how Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris are variants on Pinot Noir). At some point, though, people may have just gotten tired of saying Vermentino Pigato and started calling the splotchy grape Pigato for short. Over time, the connection to Vermentino wasn't totally forgotten, but it fell far enough by the wayside that Vermentino and Pigato started to be seen as totally different grapes. Even with the DNA testing done and published, many sources are still not aware of the connection even today. Bastianich and Lynch, for example, believe the Greek origin story for Pigato in their Vino Italiano, which was most recently updated in 2005.

This is all leading to a thorny question, and it's one that I've written about a few other times here as well without any kind of resolution that feels satisfactory to me. Where do we draw the line in deciding which grapes are distinct and which are merely synonyms? DNA testing, at least as it currently stands, isn't the answer since if DNA is all we are concerned with, Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris shouldn't be considered separate grapes. I wonder, in this case, if the odd, splotchy pigmentation on the skins of the Pigato grape is sufficient to make the case for its differentiation from Vermentino? If so, then what about the different sub-varieties of Catarratto that have greater or lesser amounts of a foggy kind of bloom on their skins? How can we accept the one and not the other?

The short answer is that I don't know. For the purposes of this site, Pigato, Favorita and Vermentino are all considered separately in virtually every text that I have, so I will follow their lead. We'll just have to know that they are indistinguishable from one another within the context of modern DNA analysis and marvel that modern science has allowed us to see so deeply into what makes up these individual plants, but for some of them, our own crude eyes may still be the best tool to tell them apart.

The first Pigato based wine that I was able to try was the 2005 Bruna "Le Ruseghine" from the Riviera Ligure di Ponente DOC, located just west of Genova and just south of Piemonte. The wine set me back about $34, which, unfortunately, isn't all that unusual for wines from Liguria. The unforgiving geography means that most of the vineyard work must be done by hand rather than by machine, which means that labor costs are higher. Further, the touristy nature of the region means that they can get away with charging higher prices for the local tourist trade, and so most people do. In the glass the wine was a light gold color, showing a bit of its age. The nose was fairly open with aromas of pineapple and grapefruit peel. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of lemon, melon and citrus peel with a distinct and prominent stony kind of minerality to it. Overall, the wine was old and there just wasn't really any two ways about it. A lot of the fruit had faded to a bitter kind of pithiness and the wine was just clearly over the hill and suffering for it.

Luckily I was also able to find a 2009 Claudio Vio Pigato from the Riviera Ligure di Ponente from my friends at the Wine Bottega for a more reasonable $25. The back of the bottle says that the grapes are "heroically cultivated" in the tough Ligurian terrain, though at least this producer is able to keep the overall costs below $30 a bottle. In the glass the wine was a golden lemon color. The nose was fairly reserved with a touch of lemon and grapefruit peel. I don't often say that a wine has a minerally nose, but this one did have a kind of steeliness to it. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. The fruits were again fairly muted in this wine with some flavors of lemon and lemon peel with pineapple and white pear. There was a stony, almost flinty kind of minerality to it that had a harsh, bitter edge. When opening the first bottle, I was certain that age had played a large role in the muted aromatics and flavor profile of the wine, but after this bottle, perhaps that's just characteristic of the grape. Neither bottle really had much to recommend it, in my opinion, especially given the fairly high sticker prices on them. They kind of tasted like Riesling that someone had sucked all of the fun out of. If you're a fan of lean, steely white wines with acid to spare, then maybe Pigato is your thing.

Tibouren - Côtes de Provence, France

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:45:00 +0000

Today's wine should be a fun one since not only is the grape somewhat unusual, but the style of the wine is as well. My friend Matt over at the Wine Bottega was so excited when he got this in their shop that he emailed me right away. At the time, I was on a real Jura kick and was drinking a lot of Vin Jaune and other slightly oxidized white wines from the region that Matt was helping me to track down, so when this popped up, he let me know right away. And I'm glad that he did, because this wine was not only right up my alley in terms of how unusual it was, but it was also really tasty to boot. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with the grape itself, Tibouren.

Jancis Robinson, in her Oxford Companion to Wine, calls Tibouren "the Provençal grape variety" because of its long history within the region and the typically Provençal character that wines made from the grape tend to possess. Despite this kind of critical praise, Tibouren isn't all that widely planted. As of 2000, it covered about 450 hectares, or just over 1,100 acres, nearly all of which are located in the Var region of Provence. The reason for its unpopularity with most growers will sound familiar to those of you who've been reading along with me for awhile: it's a pain to grow in the vineyard. Mainly, the problem is that the vine is very susceptible to a condition known as coulure, which is an affliction that causes the tiny berries that form just after flowering to fall off of the cluster, and when coulure hits hard, as you might expect, yields from the vine drop dramatically. From year to year, it's difficult to try to predict what kinds of yields the Tibouren vine will provide since coulure is influenced by a number of factors that are out of the grower's hands, meaning that some years coulure isn't much of a problem and yields are good, but other years coulure is a menace and yields are way down. You only find out how much of a problem coulure is going to be when it hits, and by then there's nothing to be done. When you grow grapes for a living, it's very inconvenient to have no idea what your crop size will be so many growers moved away from Tibouren to more reliable and consistently yielding vines.

I mentioned above that Tibouren had a long history in Provence. As with most issues regarding the provenance of a specific grape, that particular fact is in some dispute. The noted ampelographer Pierre Galet believes that the grape's origins are Middle Eastern because of the unique shape of the vine's leaves. The leaves of grapevines are made up of individual lobes and the curved area between these lobes are called sinuses. Many vines are easily identifiable because of the relative depth or shallowness of the sinuses. Riesling, as you can see in this picture, has kind of fat looking lobes with shallow, narrow sinuses. Tibouren, as you can see on the right, has deep, very well defined sinuses, which apparently are more common in vines from the Middle East. Galet's theory is that the vine's ancestors were brought over to Greece and then imported into Marseilles at some point in the fairly distant past. The competing theory is that the grape was only brought into Provence via Saint-Tropez on the Riviera in the late 18th Century by a Navy captain named Antiboul, for whom the grape is named (kind of...if you try really hard you can probably get to Tibouren from Antiboul, but the synonyms Antibois, Antiboulen, Antiboulène, Antibouren, and Antibourin are definitely more directly named for him).

Wherever it is ultimately from, Tibouren is now almost exclusively a product of Provence. It is used mostly in the production of rosé wines, though it is occasionally used as a blending ingredient in some of the local red wines. Jancis Robinson has famously proclaimed that wines made from the grape have an aroma of garrigue. Others have followed her example, though few of them take the time to explain to their readers just what the heck garrigue is. Garrigue is basically the name of the underbrush or the wild scrub that grows in the limestone rich soils of the regions around the European coast of the Mediterranean Sea, particularly in the region of Provence. The garrigue is made up of many different kinds of plants, but most notably there are a lot of wild herbs like lavender, sage, rosemary and thyme. It's an evocative term to be sure but it's also kind of exclusionary because if you've not been to the region (and I haven't), it's a little difficult to get a real sense of just what garrigue might be. It must be more than wild herbs or she'd just say wild herbs (you'd hope), but filling in the blanks is difficult. The precision of tasting note terms is an argument for a different time, though, so let's try to soldier on.

Provence is interesting because it is the only region in France other than Bordeaux to develop a classification system based on noted estates (other French classification systems classify vineyards, not producers). In 1955, eighteen estates were given the ranking Crus Classés, and as far as I know, the classification hasn't been altered since then. One of the estates ranked is Clos Cibonne, who makes the wine that I'll be reviewing below. The estate was purchased by the Roux family in 1797 from a guy named Jean Baptiste de Cibon. The Roux family made wines from grapes grown on the property for many years. In the 1930's, André Roux completely modernized the winery and began to really focus on quality production, making a real name for the estate as a serious producer. He also uprooted all of the Mourvedre vines on the property and replanted them over to Tibouren, a grape that he had great belief in. Clos Cibonne was even given special permission from the AOC to use the word Tibouren on their labels, a practice which, until very recently, was really only allowed in Alsace.

The Tibouren vines, covering about 15 hectares, are mostly located about 800 meters from the Mediterranean in a kind of natural bowl that faces south to the sea. The warm air and southern exposure helps to ensure that the grapes ripen properly. The grapes are harvested and then vinified in stainless steel before the real fun begins. The tank-fermented wine is pumped into 100 year old neutral wood barrels called foudres which hold 5,000L each (about 1,320 gallons) where it is aged for one year under a thin veil of yeast known as fleurette. The yeast actually protects the wine from oxidation, to some extent, while imparting its own unique kind of flavor to the finished wine.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2009 Close Cibonne Tibouren rosé from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $27. I also spotted the wine over at the Spirited Gourmet, but I don't have a price on it and would be surprised if they had much left at this point anyway, though if you're interested I'm sure either shop could track a bottle down for you. In the glass, the wine was a medium salmon pink color. The nose was fairly aromatic with juicy watermelon, strawberry and maraschino cherry fruits with a hint of dried herbs (or something slightly herbal in any case). On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. The fruit flavors were a bit more subdued than they were on the nose with some watermelon and strawberry fruits backed by a kind of saline tang and a clean, minerally finish. Overall the wine was bright, vibrant and clean with a really interesting mix of fruit and salinity that kept me reaching for the glass. It was kind of like someone took a really fresh rosé wine and spiked it with a little bit of Fino Sherry. It is on the expensive side for a rosé, but it's just so interesting and unique and, yes, tasty that I really didn't mind paying it. Fans of wines aged under a yeast film like Sherry or Jura wines should definitely check this out. People who aren't such fans of those kinds of wines might also find themselves pleasantly surprised by this wine, as the salinity and nuttiness aren't nearly as prevalent as they are for those kinds of wines.

Casetta (Foja Tonda) - Terra dei Forti, Veneto, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:28:00 +0000

Today's grape, like the Roscetto grape I wrote about several months back, is one of those ultra-rarities that has been brought back from the brink of extinction through the efforts of a single producer who essentially has the current market on wines made from the grape cornered. Unfortunately, that means that they also have the market cornered on information available about the grape, so for the most part, what information there is either comes from the winery directly or from other bloggers whose information seems to come directly from the winery. So I'll issue the same caveat I did with my Roscetto post which is that since all of our information is coming from essentially the same place, our ability to cross-check any information is seriously limited and we're pretty much forced to take the winery's word for all of the information we have.

Albino Armani is the name of the winery and they've been doing business in northeastern Italy for over 400 years. They have vineyard holdings in Trentino, Friuli and the Veneto and they make a wide variety of wines within those regions. The story goes that in the 1980's, Albino Armani was starting to worry about the loss of many of the grapes native to some of these regions, so he set out to try and preserve what was left of them. It looks like he made quite a few discoveries, but like the Pugnitello we took a look at a few weeks back, one in particular was more exciting than the others. That grape was called Casetta, which is known as Foja Tonda in the local dialect, which means something like "round leaf." The "Foja Tonda" is a bit of marketing gimmickry, as Albino Armani has the phrase trademarked and so is the only producer permitted to use it. Not that there's a lot of competition. It's estimated that there are only about 14 acres of Casetta in Italy (and therefore in the world since the grape is not thought to be grown anywhere else) and Armani owns and cultivates 12 of them. The winery believes that the grape's history in the region can be traced back, vaguely, to "antiquity," and that it ultimately fell out of favor with growers who were interested in more productively yielding vines.

For better or for worse there are "powers that be" in the world of Italian wine which have something of a say about what grapes can be cultivated and vinified in certain geographical regions. Casetta was not approved for use anywhere, and so Albino Armani had to go through all of the processes of getting it approved. At Albino's urging, the grape was officially reinstated for cultivation in 2002 (which basically means that it's on the governmental list of approved cultivars), and was approved for use in the Terra dei Forti DOC, where it must comprise at least 85% of the blend, as of the 2007 vintage (it is not permitted for use in any other DOC). The Terra dei Forti DOC covers the Adige Valley between Trentino and the Veneto, is home to about 20 wineries, and has over 1300 hectares of vines divided up between over 1000 different growers. I'm not totally sure, but I believe that 2005 was the first commercially available vintage of this wine, as there doesn't seem to be any online reviews for any prior vintages.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2006 Foja Tonda (100% Casetta), which is labeled as Vallagarina IGT since it was made the year before the DOC regulations came into effect, for about $20 from my friends at Curtis Liquors. In the glass, the wine had a medium purple ruby color. The nose was moderately aromatic with bright and juicy aromas of red cherry, black raspberry and waxy red fruit. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with high acid and low tannins. There were flavors of sour cherry, black raspberry and wild raspberry fruit with some wild and dried blueberry flavors and a hint of chocolate. The overall character was of tart, wild, brambly berryish fruits. It's not deeply complex or intense, but it is bright and very fruity with just a hint of chocolate and leather to round out the bottom end. If you're not a fan of high-acid red wines, this probably won't do much for you. This would be a very nice wine for someone looking to jazz up spaghetti and meatballs or for someone looking for something a little different on pizza night.

Catarratto - Sicily, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:42:00 +0000

Pop quiz time again: what is the second most planted grape in all of Italy? As you might expect, Sangiovese is number one but I would have guessed that Trebbiano was right behind it and I definitely would have guessed that Trebbiano was the most widely planted white grape in Italy. It is true that if you count all of the various sub-types of Trebbiano under a single heading, then Trebbiano becomes the most widely planted grape in Italy, but as of 2000, the Istituto Statistica Mercati Agro-Alimentari in Italy regards them separately, so I'll follow suit. Trebbiano Toscana comes in third right behind today's grape, Catarratto (specifically Catarratto Bianco Comune, but we'll get to that in a minute).

The really amazing thing about Catarratto's high placement on that list is that all of the plantings of the grape are on Sicily, and nearly all of them are concentrated in the western part of the island. In fact, Catarratto accounts for over 60% of the vineyard area on the island of Sicily, which is no mean feat as Sicily has more acreage devoted to the vine than any other region of Italy with over 330,000 acres planted. Catarratto Bianco Comune covered about 109,000 acres in 2000, which was actually down from nearly 150,000 acres in 1990. None of those figures account for plantings of Catarratto Bianco Lucido which stood at about 20,000 acres in 2000. So what's the big deal? Why is so much land devoted to this grape? The reason is pretty simple. Catarratto is low-maintenance in the vineyard and yields like crazy, which is the perfect storm for growers whose main concern is selling their juice off for bulk wine production. Catarratto is also important in the production of Marsala, but, as mentioned in the Grillo post a few days back, Marsala production has also become an industrialized, bulk production kind of affair and Catarratto's high yields, fairly neutral character and tendency to oxidize easily are all perfect for those kinds of operations.

I noted above that the planting figures were different for Catarratto Bianco Comune and Catarratto Bianco Lucido. The Italian authorities recognize these as two distinct grape varieties, but recent DNA testing has confirmed that they are actually clonal variants of the same grape (there are actually more than just these two, all genetically identical, but these are the most important in terms of acreage and volume). They are distinguished from one another by the relative presence or absence of a whitish bloom on the skins of the grapes as they mature. Comune has the most whitish color present while Lucido has less, creating a clearer, glossier looking grape skin. Another sub-variety known as Extra-Lucido was discovered and isolated in 1971 from some Lucido vines and, as you might expect, it has virtually no bloom on the skins. Comune is the more prolific producer, which is why its plantings tower over plantings for the other sub-varieties (all are rather voluminous yielders, though). The Oxford Companion to Wine asserts that Lucido is the finer of the two in terms of quality production, but Bastianich and Lynch in their Vino Italiano hold that the differences between the two sub-varieties is subtle at most. The tiebreaker goes to Nicolas Belfrage who, in his Brunello to Zibibbo maintains that Lucido is indeed the finer of the sub-varieties.

I don't know which one was in the bottle of Catarratto that I was able to find, but the odds suggest that it's probably Catarratto Bianco Comune. I picked up a bottle of the 2008 Feudo Montoni Catarratto locally for about $20. In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon-gold color. The nose was nicely aromatic with green apple and apple pie filling aromas with some pineapple tropical fruit notes. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity. There were flavors of baked apples and apple cider with a touch of lemony citrus. The finish was bitter with a powdery, chalky kind of edge to it. The cidery notes kept getting stronger as the wine stayed open, making it harder and harder to drink. Overall, I didn't care for this at all. Even taking into account that it is probably just a little past its prime, the flavors here were too one dimensional and the chalky texture was so unpleasant that it became a struggle to get through this bottle. I'm always wary of writing a grape off due to one bad bottle, so I'll keep my eyes open for something a little fresher and will post a review if I come across anything.

Uva di Troia (Nero di Troia) - Castel del Monte, Puglia, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:22:00 +0000

You might be inclined, upon seeing the name of today's grape, to assume that it has something to do with the ancient city of Troy. "Troia" is right there in the name, you might say, so there must be some connection between the two. While you wouldn't be alone in thinking that, you also wouldn't be correct. It seems to happen a lot in the wine world (and beyond) that someone takes a quick look at a word and uses their intuition to come up with an explanation for it rather than doing any research. In actuality, the name of the grape most likely comes from a town named Troia in Puglia which is west of the town of Foggia in the northern part of the region, which isn't nearly as exciting as a reference to the ancient city of Troy, but sometimes facts can be pretty boring.

It is thought that Uva di Troia came to Puglia via Greece several thousand years ago. The name of the game in Puglia has traditionally be high volume, bulk wine production so over the years growers would select certain vines that had larger grapes with more clusters to replant in their vineyards in order to increase the amount of juice that each vine could produce. This kind of clonal selection in the field has result in a handful of distinctive clonal variants that differ primarily in the size of the grape and the compactness of the bunches. As you might expect, those clones with very large berries tends to produce inferior wine. The obvious reason is that the juice is less concentrated on these vines and the wine is dilute and lacking in flavor. The less obvious reason is that Uva di Troia has a tendency for its bunches to ripen unevenly and the larger berries of certain clones cause the bunches to be more compact, making it difficult for some of the grapes closer to the center of the bunch to ripen completely since they are shielded from the sun. These underripe grapes are tossed into the fermentation vat along with everything else where they contribute harsh tannins and acid to the finished wine. Clonal variants with looser clusters and smaller berries are generally preferred for quality production, as the juice is more concentrated and the berries ripen more evenly and completely, making for a less harsh wine.

The grape is somewhat noteworthy for just how average it is across the board when you look at its viticultural characteristics. It's fairly resistant to a wide variety of diseases, it yields fairly abundantly (depending on which clone is planted) and it isn't prone to dropping clusters or berries during the growing season. It tolerates the heat of Puglia fairly well and while it's a fairly late ripener, that's not a big problem in the warm, dry Puglian climate. Increasingly, however, plantings of Uva di Troia are on the decline. It seems that Uva di Troia isn't quite as user friendly as the other Puglian stand-bys, Negroamaro and Primitivo, either in the vineyard, the winery or the marketplace. Further, the DOC regulations for the most important region for Uva di Troia, Castel del Monte, are set up in such a way that use of the grape in the DOC wine isn't necessary. The regulations stipulate that the wine must contain Uva di Troia and/or Aglianico and/or Montepulciano with up to 35% of non-aromatic red grapes added. What that means is that a red wine from Castel del Monte can be 100% Uva di Troia, 100% Aglianico, 100% Montepulciano or any blend of the three grapes with over 1/3 of the blend allowed to come from virtually any other red grape. There are a handful of other DOC regions that have Uva di Troia as the primary grape, but Castel del Monte is by far the most important economically and since there is no incentive for growers or winemakers to use the grape, many are moving away from it to the more recognizable Aglianico and Montepulciano grapes.

Fortunately, there are still some wines made from the Uva di Troia grape. The Rivera winery is one of them and I was able to pick up a bottle of their 2003 "Il Falcone" bottling for about $33. The wine is 70% Uva di Troia (called Nero di Troia by them, and supposedly made up of three different clones) and 30% Montepulciano. The wine is from the Castel del Monte DOC, which is named for an octagonal castle in the area that was built by Frederick II in the 12th Century. Frederick was apparently a big fan of hunting with Falcons, which is how "Il Falcone" got its name. In the glass the wine was a very deep purple-ruby color that was opaque nearly all the way out to the rim. The nose on the wine was very reserved with purple fruit that had a blackcurrant character to it with a hint of smoke. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and medium tannins. There were flavors of ripe black cherry and blackberry fruits with smoke, leather, tobacco, cocoa and cassis. This is a dark and brooding wine with ripe fruit flavors that are held in check by the rich, earthy flavors. This is very well balanced, very deep and very interesting. It's hard to call a $30 bottle of wine a value, but if I had paid $50 for this wine, I still would have felt like I got my money's worth out of it. It's a really fascinating, deep, complex wine that would be an ideal companion for game or grilled meats. It's probably as good as Uva di Troia gets so if you happen to run across it, definitely give it a shot.

Grillo - Sicily, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:39:00 +0000

When researching grapes for this blog, I occasionally stumble over interesting stuff completely by accident. In the case of today's grape, Grillo, I was simply looking online for a picture of some grapes that I could use to decorate the post with. It's usually sufficient to enter the name of the grape into a Google image search to get what I'm looking for, but occasionally there are some surprises. When I entered Grillo into the search today, I got back pages and pages of pictures of all kinds of crickets because, apparently, grillo is the Italian word for cricket. So, for those of you like me who do not speak any Italian, there's your word for the day. As for why the grape is known as Grillo, I have no idea. Nobody who writes about the grape seems all that interested in the fact that the grape's name also means cricket, so my guess is that it's probably just a coincidence. Nothing about the grapes or the vines look like a cricket to me and, as far as I know, crickets don't eat grapes, so I'm out of ideas as to the source of the name.

It turns out that exactly where the grape comes from is a bit of a mystery as well. The most popular explanation online is that the grape came to Sicily via Puglia. Nicolas Belfrage, in his Brunello to Zibibbo is doubtful about this since there doesn't appear to be anything like Grillo at all in Puglia. Further, those who champion this explanation believe that the grape came to Sicily only after phylloxera struck the Italian vineyards, which would mean that it has only been grown on Sicily for about 150 years at the most. I'm skeptical about this since another factoid given out about Grillo is that it was the basis for the famous Roman wine called Mamertino, which was a favorite of Julius Caesar. One assumes that the ancient Mamertino wine was made around the area of Mamertino, which is itself on the island of Sicily, so if it is true that Grillo is the base of the Mamertino wine of old, then we have to posit that Grillo has been on the island of Sicily for several thousand years. It is, of course, unbelievably difficult to match modern grapes to historical wines, so that's not exactly a smoking gun, but Belfrage's observation about the lack of similar grapes in Puglia seems pretty damning to me. His theory is that the grape came to Sicily with the Phoenicians thousands of years ago, but given that Grillo's parents are listed on the VIVC as Muscat of Alexandria and Catarratto, which is thought to be native to Sicily, it seems more likely to me that Grillo was born on Sicily at some point in the distant past.

Grillo is particularly well suited to the Sicilian climate as it is very tolerant of high temperatures and dry conditions, which Sicily has in abundance. Further, the grape is capable of reaching fairly high sugar levels when ripe, which was a major boon when it was the primary grape used in the production of Marsala. Marsala, as some of you may know, is a fortified wine produced on the island of Sicily that is made in a way that is similar to Sherry. The Sicilian name for what the Spanish call the solera system is in perpetuum. In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, Marsala was a big deal on the international wine scene, but demand for it has fallen even more precipitously than for the fortified wines of other areas such as Madeira, Port and Sherry. For the most part, the Marsala of today is industrially produced and is good for little more than use as a cooking wine. There are some artisan producers still making quality Marsala, but it is very difficult to find.

Grillo was once fairly widely planted, but as you might expect, once demand for the principal wine produced from it began to fall, acreage devoted to the vine began to decline as well. It's also not exactly a prolific yielder, so as the process for Marsala production began to shift over to a bulk, industrial process, Grillo was uprooted in favor of the Catarratto grape, which yields more productively and reliably. The low point for Grillo came in the early 1990's when acreage devoted to the grape fell below 5,000 acres. Plantings have rebounded lately as the popularity of dry white table wines has increased over the past twenty years or so, and growers and consumers have found that Grillo can make interesting, characterful table wines.

I was able to find two wines made from the Grillo grape. The first was the 2008 Corvo "Terrae Dei" which I was able to find for about $12. In the glass, the wine had a medium lemon-gold color. The nose was shy with a little bit of lemon and pear, but not much. It picks up a little funky leesy, cheesy kind of aroma as it approaches room temperature, but it never really gets that strong. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity. The sensation was of light, delicate fruits like lemon, lime, green apple and creamy pear. The leesy kind of flavor persisted a bit onto the palate as well, providing an interesting, slightly cheesy and funky kind of flavor that picks up as the wine approaches room temperature, but never gets out of control. I was a little concerned when I bought this bottle that it might be in the midst of its decline, and I think I was probably right. It's drinking OK right now, but the fruit flavors are definitely in full retreat here.

Luckily I was able to find a bottle of the 2009 Ca' di Ponti Grillo from my friends at the Gypsy Kitchen for about $10. In the glass, the wine was a fairly pale silvery lemon color. The nose was very aromatic with melon, green apple, pineapple and grapefruit aromas. It was like a fruit cocktail leaping out of the glass. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity. There were flavors of creamy pear and melon with some banana and lemony citrus. The fruits were much more muted on the palate than on the nose, which surprised me a little bit. I have in my notes that the overall flavor profile was "broad," which, to me, means that the acid is fairly muted and the wine has almost a kind of creamy mouthfeel. A broad wine has more acidity than a "flabby" wine, but it's still on the lower side of balanced. I'm a sucker for a high-acid white wine, so this didn't really do it for me, though it is a very nicely made wine and at only $10 a bottle represents a very good value. Those looking for a substitute for Chardonnay will find a lot to like here, but I just need more zip in my whites than this wine can provide.

Bonus factoid for those of you who read all the way to the end: Grillo is unusual in that it only has one known synonym. The grape is also known as Riddu in some places, though the Palomino Fino grape has Grillo as one of its accepted synonyms. Most grapes pick up dozens of synonyms as they move through different regions (see Chasselas and its 200+ different names), but Grillo only has the one.

Pugnitello - Tuscany, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:40:00 +0000

When I'm out shopping for unusual wines for this website, there are a few sections of most wine shops that I linger in, and a few sections that I blow right through. I usually blow through the South American section, for example, because for the most part, I know exactly what I'm going to find there. The South American sections of nearly every wine shop on earth are laid out the same way with the same kinds of wines in them and I know that the likelihood of me finding something unusual is pretty slim. I tend to linger a little longer in the Italian sections of most shops and really pay attention to what they have because the chances of my finding something unusual in the Italian section are much higher than they are for pretty much any other section in the store.

Some of the larger shops have their Italian sections broken up into smaller, region-specific sections as well, and there are some parts of Italy that I really linger over and some parts that I blow right by. I really dive in to the sections devoted to the wines of Piedmont (or anywhere in northern Italy, really) and Sicily in particular, but the region that I find that I skip over the most is Tuscany. It's certainly not because I don't love wines from this region, it's just that for the most part, Tuscany's wines are very mainstream and the grapes that they use for nearly all of the wines are very well known. I've been dying to try a wine made mostly from some of the supporting players in Chianti like Colorino or Canaiolo, but so far haven't had any luck in finding one. The DOC reds are almost all made from Sangiovese of one form or another while the IGT wines are nearly all some blend of Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. I am a big fan of these wines at my dinner table, but for the purposes of this website, Tuscany doesn't provide me with a lot of material. To date, I've only written about one wine from Tuscany, a Teroldego/Syrah blend that was very nice, but which has proven to be an extreme outlier in the world of Tuscan wine.

Which is too bad, because it turns out that there are a lot of grapes that are native to Tuscany that may be of some interest to the wine world. In the 1980's, a group of researchers got together with the aim of identifying and preserving what was left of the native grape population throughout Tuscany in an attempt to stave off the selective extinction of a large number of heirloom grape varieties. They visited 500 estates throughout Tuscany and identified 229 different grapes that were growing throughout the region. They took samples and planted 18 vines of each of them in an experimental vineyard property owned by the San Felice winery called "Vitiarium." A large number of the vines produced grapes that were of no commercial or viticultural interest, but a few of them showed some potential. In 1990 the researchers selected 13 of the most interesting vines and made small lots of wine from the grapes produced at Vitiarium. Of those 13, a grape called Pugnitello quickly established itself as the star of the show, and the San Felice winery planted 1000 cuttings of the vine for more large-scale experimentation. The first commercial bottlings were made in 2003 and have been made each year except for 2005. In many cases, the governmental authorities are slow to recognize new discoveries like Pugnitello, but in 2002, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture put Pugnitello in the National Registry of Vine Varieties, and in 2003 the Tuscan Regional Commission approved Pugnitello for use throughout the region. As of today, only a few wineries other than San Felice are making a varietal Pugnitello, but it is happening.

The original Pugnitello vine had been found in a vineyard near the town of Cinigiano, which is just southwest of Montalcino in Tuscany. The owner of the vineyard site had no information about the grape itself and there doesn't appear to be any record of the grape in any previous ampelographical work. The name Pugnitello was given to the grape because the clusters resemble little balled up fists (pugno, in Italian). The researchers conducted DNA testing on the grape and have thus far found no genetic links to any other existing grape varieties. It's easy to imagine how the grape could have been overlooked in the past. From a grower's perspective, it doesn't have much to recommend it. The clusters are very small and the berries themselves are on the smallish side with thick skins. The vine is also a naturally low-yielder, so pretty much any way you look at it, it doesn't look like a very profitable vine to grow.

Except for the fact that it makes really interesting wine. On the consumer end of things, we often think that this should really be the only consideration given when one decides to plant and tend to the vine, but in reality, good wine is not always profitable for the grower, and it's all too easy to see how over time growers would abandon low-yielding, unreliable vines that make excellent wine for higher yielding varieties that make an inferior product, but make more of it and make it more reliably. Those of us interested in characterful, interesting, different kinds of wines owe a great debt to growers and researchers who are committed to discovering and maintaining the great diversity of vines, whether their efforts pay off with a discovery like Pugnitello or not. The world could very easily shift over to the major ten or so major grape varieties tomorrow without too much gnashing of teeth from the wine drinkers of the world, but part of what I really love about wine is its variety and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of grapes as source material. I am grateful when I hear about discoveries like Pugnitello because I'm certain that the discovery won't lead to any kind of major financial windfall for its discoverers, but the fact that they were curious enough to go out and find something like Pugnitello and make wine from it just so that they could see what might happen really excites me.

I mentioned yesterday that my friend Joe Godas over at Curtis Liquors in Weymouth invited me to his back room to sample a Mavrotragano from Santorini, Greece, he had been given. As he mentions in the comments to that post, his disappointment was as great as mine was at how the Mavrotragano turned out, but little did I know that he had a backup plan. Joe hadn't told me about the Pugnitello before I showed up, but given the Mavrotragano's poor showing, he was gracious enough to open a bottle of the 2006 San Felice Pugnitello da San Felice that he had also been given as a sample bottle. I'm not sure about the SRP, but online prices for this wine seem to be somewhere between $36 and $60. In the glass, the wine was a deep purple ruby color with a medium purple-crimson rim. The nose was somewhat reserved with savory leathery funk over a bit of red cherry fruit. As the wine opened up a bit, some darker, blacker fruits started to show up as well. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tannins. There were ripe cherry fruit flavors with a bit of blackberry, leather, cocoa and espresso. The wine walked the line between dark, ripe fruits and savory, earthy flavors extraordinarily well. It was a bit closer to Brunello than Chianti in style, but really walked the line between the two nicely. This is a very very good wine and it was universally preferred amongst the local distributor's and customer's in Joe's back room to the flashier, oakier Mavrotragano that had preceded it. Yes, this wine sees some new oak, but it's much more integrated here and it gives the grape a chance to express itself in the glass. If you run across this rarity, I'd definitely recommend it to you not only for the great story, but also for the great wine you'll find in your glass.

Mavrotragano - Santorini, Greece

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:45:00 +0000

It doesn't happen all that often, but it does occasionally happen that I will get an invitation from someone familiar with this site to sample an interesting bottle of wine that I wouldn't ordinarily have access to. In today's case, what happened was that Joe Godas, the head wine guy over at Curtis Liquors in Weymouth, received a sample bottle of a wine made from the Mavrotragano grape that he invited me to his shop to try out.

Mavrotragano has been on my radar since I picked up a few bottles of wine made from the Mandilaria grape on the island of Santorini in Greece. In doing the research for those wines, I came across the following passage in Konstantinos Lazarakis' excellent book, The Wines of Greece: "...in terms of quality, it [Mandilaria] is totally eclipsed by the much rarer Mavrotragano...[which] can be Greece's answer to Mourvedre." I rather enjoyed the Mandilaria that I was able to try, so I was very intrigued by the notion that the little blending partner in the wines I had may be the real star. I tried to track down a bottle made mostly from Mavrotragano grapes, but it turns out that very few bottles are actually made and not very much of it finds its way to US shores. The producer for the bottle that I was able to try only makes about 500 cases per year, just to give you an idea.

And, frankly, it's something of a miracle that even that much is made today. Nearly a century ago, Mavrotragano was relatively common throughout the island of Santorini, but what was grown was typically used to make a sweet red wine for the growers themselves that generally wasn't bottled or sold to the public. Through the years, a handful of circumstances began to line up that nearly sounded the death knell for the grape. First of all, Santorini is an absolutely gorgeous place and as the island began to develop something of a reputation amongst tourists, new places for the tourists to stay needed to be built. Many vineyards were torn up to make way for the hotel building blitz undertaken to keep pace with Santorini's rise in stature as a tourist destination.

This was a problem, but there were still plenty of vineyards around Santorini where Mavrotragano could have been planted. The trouble was compounded, though, by the belief that Santorini was not an appropriate place to try and make red wine due to its somewhat erratic climate and the incredibly powerful winds that tear across the island's surface. Historically, the island has been best known for its white wines made from the Assyrtiko grape, and its reputation in the wider wine world has been rising rapidly over the past few decades on the strength of the wines made from that grape (it doesn't hurt anything that it's usually pretty hot on Santorini and the white wines made from Assyrtiko are very refreshing, much more so than a red wine would be, and a major market for the wines made here are the tourists looking more to unwind than to explore the island's vinous range). Further, Assyrtiko is easier to grow in the difficult conditions on Santorini than Mavrotragano, and many growers uprooted their Mavrotragano plantings for new Assyrtiko plantings in greater and greater numbers through the years until Mavrotragano occupied less than 2% of the vineyard land by the year 2000.

As happens in so many places, though, there were a certain number of growers whose curiosity and experimental spirit wouldn't allow them to be content with the one-dimensional view of Santorini wine that had begun to take hold. A few of them looked to the native red grapes that they had on the island and saw that Mavrotragano might have some potential. There were some experimental trials run in the late 1990's that began to show promise, and a few estates began to plant over small vineyard sites to the Mavrotragano grape. Production is still small, but there is a buzz growing about these wines in the international community that seems to indicate that Santorini may have found a red star to complement its already famous Assyrtiko.

As mentioned above, the wine that I was able to try was a sample bottle. I tasted the wine with Joe and a few other locals in a back room at Curtis Liquors following a public tasting of some Italian wines that the shop had put on. The wine was from the 2008 vintage and was from the Domaine Sigalas, who apparently has about 8 hectares of land devoted to the Mavrotragano grape. I'm not entirely sure what the SRP is for this bottle, though Decanter has it listed at £12 in the UK market. In the glass, the wine was a deep crimson ruby color that was opaque in the center to a narrow crimson rim. The nose was nicely aromatic with spicy blueberry, blackberry, black cherry and boysenberry fruits with a touch of smoke to them. The nose was very deep with a lot of interesting fruit aromas. On the palate, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acid and medium tannins. The flavors were very ripe with rich black and blue fruit flavors throughout. There were flavors of blueberry pie, black cherry and blackberry with some baking spice and chocolate and a touch of black pepper. The oak influence was incredibly pronounced here, and the back label confirmed what a lot of us in the room were picking up on. The wine spends 18 months in new oak, and it wears it very loudly. The wine wasn't necessarily bad, but I know that I was somewhat disappointed that so much oak was applied to the wine, as it really masked what might exist for varietal character or any real sense of place. Instead, the wine came across as most similar to a California Zinfandel or an Aussie Shiraz, an overripe fruit bomb (14% abv for those interested) slathered in new oak that can be enjoyable in its own way, but which is interchangeable with any number of other bottles. Oak tastes like oak no matter what and it's disturbing to see something so rare hidden behind all that make-up.

Southwest France Round-Up - Virtual Tasting of 12/7/11

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:24:00 +0000

Last Wednesday night I was invited to a virtual tasting of eight wines from all over Southwest France. The tasting was led by Master Sommelier and spokesperson for the South West Wines of France Council Fred Dexheimer, who led a group of bloggers through the eight wines that were provided to us free of charge. Today I'd like to give my impressions of the eight wines we tasted, some of which we've covered here before and some of which we'll get to shortly.

The total vineyard area for Southwest France is about 50,000 hectares, half of which are in the hands of private producers and half of which is used by members of local co-ops. The region produces about 450 million bottles of wine annually, split pretty evenly between white wines on one hand and red and rosé wines on the other. There's also a small percentage of sparkling wine here made in the very old (older than the Champagne method) methode ancestrale which we took a brief look at when we looked at a wine made from the Mauzac grape. I've written fairly extensively about the local wine histories of the subregions of Gaillac, Marcillac, Jurançon and Fronton elsewhere on the site, so I won't go over all that again. Instead, I'm just going to jump right in and go through the wines in the order they were presented to us.

The first wine was the 2010 Producteurs Plaimont "Colombelle" Blanc from the Côtes de Gascogne, which is just south of Bordeaux in the Armagnac region of France. The blend here is 80% Colombard and 20% Sauvignon Blanc and Ugni Blanc and the SRP is $10. In the glass, the wine was a pale silvery lemon color. The nose was very aromatic with white grapefruit and grapefruit peel with a bit of pear fruit as well. There was also a very prominent kind of grassy herbaceousness that reminded me a lot of Sauvignon Blanc. On the palate, the wine was light bodied with high acidity. There were flavors of tart lemon, white grapefruit and sour pineapple. The grassy herbaceous character extended through the palate as well. The wine was clean and very refreshing with a stony minerality to the finish. This wine would be a great stand-in for those looking for a substitute for Sauvignon Blanc or anyone looking for a tart, high acid aperitif. Surprisingly, this wine held up very well the next day, and even tasted a little better as the acid had calmed down a bit. For $10, this is an outstanding wine that would be great with shellfish or light chicken dishes.

The second wine we tried was from the same vintage and producer, but was a red wine (called Colombelle Rouge) that was about 60% Tannat, 20% Merlot and 20% Cabernet Sauvignon with an SRP of $10. Tannat is usually a very fierce grape in its youth, so to soften it, the winemakers used a technique known as micro-oxygenation, which is essentially like sticking an aquarium bubbler into the wine as it is fermenting to introduce a lot of oxygen very quickly which reduces the tannic bite of a wine and makes it more approachable in its youth. The technique is not without controversy, but you can go watch Mondovino or read any number of other writers if you're interested. In the glass, this wine was a medium purple ruby color which wasn't all that deep, but which was very intense. The nose was nicely aromatic with black cherry and dark plummy fruit with a noticeable bell pepper edge to it. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and low tannins. There was juicy cherryish fruit with some bell pepper herbaceousness and some dark, earthy undertones to balance it out. Overall, it was a little thin and hollow for my tastes, but it represents a pretty decent value for the money. It had completely fallen apart by day two and, overall, it was my least favorite wine of the tasting.

For the third wine, we went back to the whites and had a 2008 Château Montus Blanc that was from the Pacherenc du Vic-Bilh, which is the name for white wines made in the Madiran region. The wine is made up of 90% Petit Courbu and 10% Petit Manseng with an SRP of $27. The wine is aged on the lees in very large (600 gallon) new French Oak barrels for between 6-8 months before bottling. In the glass, the wine had a deep golden straw color. The nose was nicely aromatic with vanilla, butterscotch and baked apple aromas with some pear, pineapple and pastry crust. On the palate, the wine was just on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of lemony citrus, ripe apple and tropical pineapple flavors with side notes of pastry dough, butter and vanilla. I am usually not a fan of oak in white wines, but the oak is integrated beautifully here and the wine is exceptionally balanced. It's very similar to a fine white Burgundy and would pair with essentially the same kinds of dishes. This wine suffered a bit on day two, but it was one of only two of the bottles that I completely finished and it was the second best wine of the tasting in my opinion. $27 is a little high, but the quality is exceptional here and I wouldn't hesitate to pay full retail for this wine should I run across it again.

The fourth wine was one that I've had before and one I've written about here. The wine was the 2010 Domaine du Cros "Lo Sang del Pais" made from the Fer Servadou grape (100%) in the Marcillac region. The SRP for this bottle is around $12. In the glass, the wine was a deep, nearly opaque purple-ruby color. The nose was nicely aromatic with waxy black cherry and brambly blackberry fruit with some vegetal, smoky bell pepper aromas. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tannins. There were flavors of dark black fruits like blackberry and black cherry with a lot of smoke and savory meat flavors as well. The tasting note provided to us says that the wine "displays the iron mineral character that is characteristic of the terroir," and I can kind of see that, I guess. There was a bitter, metallic tang to the finish of the wine that reminded me of the unfortunate occasions in my life when I've had a bit of rusty metal in my mouth. Iron oxide does have a particular tang to it, and I could certainly see it here, though I'm not totally sure if it was a good thing or not. I wasn't a bit fan of this wine the first time I had it, and I'm still not totally sold on it, but for $12, it's definitely worth a shot for those curious about Fer Servadou. The wine held up pretty well by day two, but there were other wines that I was more interested in within this tasting.

The fifth wine we tasted was the 2008 Domaine des Terrisses Gaillac Rouge which was 50% Fer Servadou, 30% Duras and 20% Syrah. The SRP for this wine is $13. In the glass, the wine was a very deep, purple ruby color that was inky black in the center all the way out to a very narrow violet rim. The nose was a bit reserved with some smoky black fruit and a little bit of bell pepper herbaceousness. On the palate, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and fairly high tannins. There were flavors of dark black cherry and blackberry fruit with an intense smokiness and bitter iron tang on the finish. There was also a touch of black pepper that lingered on the finish. The wine was dark, brooding and a bit backward, needing a bit of time to really open up, which was a little surprising to me since our notes say that the wine is matured in stainless steel instead of wood. Perhaps the lack of oxidative aging kept it tightly wound, but I'm not sure. It was one of the few wines that was much better the second day. I certainly enjoyed it, but I was much more fond of the Domaine Philémon Gaillac Rouge I wrote about in my Fer post, which is available at the same price point. This wine will probably improve with some extra time in the bottle so if you run across it, maybe give it a little time before cracking it open.

The sixth wine that we tried was the 2008 Chateau Bellevue La Forêt "Ce Vin," made from the Négrette grape in the Fronton region of France. I wrote about Négrette yesterday and also wrote about this wine, so those interested in reading more about the grape can do so here, and I'll just cut and paste my tasting note from yesterday's post. In the glass, the wine was a deep, inky purple-ruby color. The nose was very aromatic with strawberry and red berry fruit with a floral, rosy kind of character to it. The nose was intoxicating and reminded me a bit of the Frappato that I wrote about a few months ago. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity and low tannins. Like the other Fronton above, the palate was a bit of letdown from the nose, as this wine had some raspberry and blackberry fruit with a touch of bitter smoke and spice. Overall, it was a little hollow and thin and the bitterness was a little too pronounced for me. I tasted all of the wines for the tasting the next day and this one had suffered the most, completely falling apart by day two.

The seventh wine we had was the 2005 Clos Fardet Cuvée Moutoue Fardet which was made from 98% Tannat and 2% Cabernet Franc. The wine is from the Madiran region and has an SRP of about $27. The wine is made with natural yeast and minimal sulfur contact and is aged in 400 liter barrels for five years before being bottled. In the glass, the wine had a deep, inky purple-black color that was opaque out to a narrow crimson rim. The nose was very aromatic with tobacco, spice box, leather, cocoa, rich black cherry, blackberry and black plum fruit and just a hint of mint. The nose was deep, complex and compelling and it was a struggle to get past the sniffing phase of the tasting. On the palate, the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity and fairly high tannins. The flavor profile was deep, dense and ripe with boysenberry, blackberry and black cherry fruit with deep earthy chocolate, baking spice and cigar tobacco flavors as well. It was incredibly powerful and layered but also exceptionally balanced. It was the hands down superstar of the tasting for me and was drinking well three days after I opened it. At $27, this wine is a steal and I wouldn't hesitate to pay double that retail if I had to. The big problem is that they only make about 350 cases total, about half of which makes it to US shores. It is a phenomenal wine that is now on my personal "buy on sight" list.

The final wine that we tried was the 2008 Domaine Brana "Ohtiza" Rouge from the very hilly Irouléguy region of France, right on the Spanish border. The wine is made up of 80% Tannat and 20% Cabernet Franc and retails for about $26. In the glass the wine was a deep purple-ruby color that was nearly opaque out to a narrow violet rim. The nose was nicely aromatic with blackberry and black cherry fruit with a touch of smoke. It turns out that I'm very sensitive to bell pepper aromas, and I picked up quite a bit on this wine. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and medium tannins. There were flavors of tart cherry and under-ripe blackberry fruits with something a little cranberryish about it. The wine was very lean and angular with sour berry fruits and vegetal flavors. Where the Madiran was all soft curves and plush fruits, this wine was sharp and sour and wasn't as much to my taste. It held up fairly well by day two, but never really got any softer. Perhaps more so than any other wine in the tasting, this wine really needed some food and I wasn't really able to accommodate it properly. This would be really good with sausage stuffed peppers or really any rich red meat dish with a heavy vegetable presence.

Overall, the tasting was exceptionally well done and I had a great time participating. There was a wonderful range of wines represented from a wide variety of regions within Southwest France. I came away from this tasting even more convinced that Southwest France is one of the great world wine regions for very good wines made from unusual grapes at great prices.

Just to reiterate, all wines reviewed above were provided to me free of charge and I have done my best to review them as objectively as I could. I received no compensation for participating in this event other than the wines.

Négrette - Fronton, France

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:06:00 +0000

We've recently been visiting Southwest France quite a bit around here, having taken a look at the Fer Servadou grape from Gaillac and Marcillac, the Duras grape from Gaillac, and the Gros Manseng grape from the Jurancon region. There are a number of really interesting grapes grown only in Southwest France and today we're going to take a look at yet another of them, the Négrette grape.

Négrette is grown in a few different areas, but Fronton is its best known home. The Côtes du Frontonnais is located just southwest of Gaillac and just north of the city of Toulouse, on the western bank of the Tarn river. The viticultural history of the region can be traced back to Roman times, as the city of Montauban, located just across the Tarn river from Fronton, was an early Roman outpost before they went on to conquer all of Gaul. The fall of Rome resulted in a very turbulent time as many Barbarian tribes invaded the region repeatedly. The mood was so bleak that many of the locals believed that the world was going to come to an end after the first millennium AD. As we all know, the year 1000 came and went without incident, and many of the landholders were so grateful for their continued existence that they donated large tracts of their land to the Catholic Church.

Around the same time, an organization known as the Knights of Saint John came into the region. The Knights were a charitable religious organization who were focused on providing food and shelter for religious pilgrims passing through the area on their way to the Holy City Santiago de Compostela (in western Spain) or on their way to the Holy Land. The Knights were based on the Greek island of Cyprus, and it is said that they brought with them a grape called "Mavro," which means "black" in Greek, which is thought to be a direct ancestor of the modern Négrette grape. Etymologically, this makes a certain sense, as both grapes are clearly named for the dark color of their skins, juice and the resulting wine. It's a good story, but it's probably not true. More recent research indicates that Négrette is probably a member of the côt family which also includes the Southwestern French grapes Malbec and Tannat. This family is thought to have been brought from Spain in the Middle Ages before settling in Southwest France. There's a story that Négrette first came to prominence in Gaillac, but that the locals believed that the grape wasn't worthy of their soils and they banished the grape to Fronton, in much the same way as Gamay was pushed out of the better vineyard sites of Burgundy. It turns out that this a great thing for the grape, as it is very prone to fungal diseases and needs a hot, dry climate such as that found in the Fronton region. There are about 1300 hectares planted throughout France with the overwhelming majority in Fronton. There is also some grown in California where it is known as Pinot St. George, though the grape appears to be unrelated to the Pinot family.

I was fortunate enough to try three different bottles containing Négrette. The first was the 2007 Le Roc "Le Classique" that I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $10. The wine is 70% Negrette, 20% Syrah and 10% Cabernet Sauvignon. The AOC regulations stipulate that the Négrette grape must make up 50 - 70% of the acreage of a grower's vineyard area, and that Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet France, Syrah or Gamay should make up no more than 25% of a final blend, while Malbec should only make up 10%. In the glass, the wine was a deep purple-ruby color and was nearly opaque through its core. The nose was very aromatic with funky wild blackberry and black cherry fruit with some wet leather. The aromatics were lifted and powerful and the wine was a real pleasure just to sniff. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with acid just on the higher side of medium and medium, powdery tannins. There were sour black cherry and blackberry fruit with some espresso and smoke. The finish is a little short with a serious bitter bite on the end, though it spreads out a bit as it opens. It was a disappointing follow-up based on the powerfully aromatic nose, but it was a very good wine, especially at the $10 price point. Red wines from the Négrette grape are meant to be drunk young, and it this one may have been starting to fall apart a bit, but it was still hanging in there.

The second wine I was able to try was the NV Nicolas Gelis "Flambant" Bulles Rouge which I picked up from my friends at the Wine Bottega for about $15. The blend here is about 85% Négrette and 15% Syrah. In the glass, the wine was a deep lavender color with a bit of fizz to it. The nose was very aromatic with blackberry candy and dusky cherry fruit with a savage, damp leaf sort of character to it. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with medium acid and a light fizz. It was medium sweet and clocked in at only 8% alcohol. It tasted kind of like a blackberry or a black cherry soda. There were a lot of candied black fruits with a touch of wild, wet underbrush to it. It reminded me a lot of Brachetto d'Acqui and had a lot of the candyish kinds of characteristics that I find in good Brachetto. It did have just enough of that savage, foresty character to it so that it wasn't like pure sugar, but it was still very friendly and was a lot of fun to drink.

I recently was asked to take part in a virtual tasting of wines from Southwest France led by Master Sommelier Fred Dexheimer, which I will be writing more about soon, but one of the wines we took a look at was the 2008 Chateau Bellevue La Forêt "Ce Vin," which retails for about $11 a bottle. I received this bottle as a free sample for the purposes of the online seminar. They told us that the wine is 100% Négrette, which is very hard to find. In the glass, the wine was a deep, inky purple-ruby color. The nose was very aromatic with strawberry and red berry fruit with a floral, rosy kind of character to it. The nose was intoxicating and reminded me a bit of the Frappato that I wrote about a few months ago. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity and low tannins. Like the other Fronton above, the palate was a bit of letdown from the nose, as this wine had some raspberry and blackberry fruit with a touch of bitter smoke and spice. Overall, it was a little hollow and thin and the bitterness was a little too pronounced for me. I tasted all of the wines for the tasting the next day and this one had suffered the most, completely falling apart by day two. I would have loved to try a Négrette from a more recent vintage, as most sources indicate that these wines deteriorate very rapidly after the vintage, but I've certainly seen enough in these three wines to excited about the possibilities for this grape.

Petite Arvine - Valle d'Aosta, Italy and Vétroz, Switzerland

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:28:00 +0000

Today's post is hardest kind of post to write. I've this really cool, rare grape to write about and my research keeps coming up with nothing. Sure, there's a sentence here or there about Petite Arvine, but there isn't all that much of substance. Sometimes I get lucky with these things and find out that there's some kind of controversy or interesting mystery about a grape, but with Petite Arvine, there just doesn't seem to be anything like that. I could, of course, just ignore the grape and move on, but I bought two bottles of this stuff and am going to find some way to make use of them. So, without further ado, here's what I was able to find about Petite Arvine.

Petite Arvine's origins are mysterious, but unfortunately that's all they are. The grape is thought to be native to Switzerland and one source claims that it has been grown in the Valais regions of Switzerland since 1602, while another source dates it to 1878. The 1878 date is important, as it is when the International Ampelographic Society met in Geneva and decided that Petite Arvine was a unique grape not found anywhere else in the Valais or in the world. It is this article that people point to when trying to establish a Swiss origin for the grape, but without knowing exactly how thorough their search was, it's hard to say how credible their statement is. The grape is also known today in the Valle d'Aosta of Italy and some source say that the grape is actually named for the Arve valley around Savoy where the grape is thought to have entered the Valais region, possibly from the Valle d'Aosta. In either case, the grape almost certainly has Alpine origins and today is found virtually nowhere other than the Valais and the Valle d'Aosta.

The grape's parentage is a mystery as well. Petite Arvine was thought to be closely related to Amigne for some time, but recent DNA testing has shown that they may not be that closely related after all. It does seem to be distantly related to Prié Blanc, Premetta and possibly Chasselas. The grape is commonly known as Arvine these days, though the Petite Arvine name was necessary for many years to differentiate it from another grape known as Grosse Arvine (or sometimes Arvine Grande) which has larger berries and which makes wine of a much lower quality. Today, Grosse Arvine is practically extinct (it does not exist in cultivation but only in grape collections) so the distinction isn't as important. The two grapes are related, but not as closely as their names might have you believe. Confusingly, both Arvine and Arvine Grande are synonyms for Silvaner, which is not related to either Petite Arvine or Grosse Arvine.

Viticulturally, Petite Arvine is a very late ripener, sometimes ripening a full month later than Chasselas. As a result, the vine needs a lot of sun to ensure that it gets completely ripe and it also needs to be protected from the wind as the clusters can be fragile. Wines made from the grape are highly esteemed, and though the Oxford Companion to Wine doesn't have much to say about Petite Arvine, it does say that it is "the finest of the grape specialties of Valais." Despite it's high critical esteem, Petite Arvine is not very widely grown, occupying only about 150 hectares of land in Switzerland, though this figure is up significantly from the 65 hectares planted in the year 2000. I couldn't find any numbers on the Italian acreage devoted to the grape, but you can be sure that it is extraordinarily small. Wines made from the grape run the gamut from bone dry to sticky sweet.

I was fortunate enough to find a bottle of Petite Arvine from both Switzerland and Italy. The first bottle I found was the 2007 Romain Papilloud Cave du Vieux Moulin Petite Arvine from the Vétroz region of Switzerland (home to our old friend Amigne). The wine came in a 500 mL bottle and I picked it up for about $39. In the glass, the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color. The nose was very shy with a little bit of peaches and honey and something a little flowery, but it was mostly a blank and never really opened up. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly low acidity and was surprisingly dry. Given the size of the bottle, I was expecting something a little sweet, but this wasn't it. There were flavors of honeysuckle flower and under ripe peaches, but it was mostly metallic and hollow tasting. I don't say this very often, but this was an awful bottle of wine. It tasted like chemicals and was just bitter and mean. It was so bad, I was only able to get through one glass and had to pour the rest down the sink, which I almost never do. I don't know if this was just a bad bottle or if this wine always tastes this way, but for $39, I won't be running the experiment twice.

The second bottle that I picked up was the 2005 Grosjean Petite Arvine which I got from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $30. In the glass the wine was a yellow gold color that was so vibrant it almost had a kind of neon tinge to it. The nose was very aromatic with ripe apple, butterscotch, pineapple tropical fruit, lees and a biscuitty, pastry-like kind of thing going on. On the palate, the wine was on the lighter side of medium with high acidity. There were flavors of ripe apple and pear, pastry dough, and a distinctive leesy, cheesy kind of flavor to it (the wine is fermented and held on its lees, which are stirred, for a month). I thought I was picking up some oak, but this wine is stainless steel fermented, so it was probably just from the lees contact. The wine not all that fleshy, but the flavors seem very decadent and rich. Nearly everything I've read about Petite Arvine says that the wines characteristically taste like grapefruits with a touch of salinity, but that wasn't my experience with these two bottles. While I wasn't a fan at all of the Swiss bottle, the Italian bottle was excellent and very enjoyable. The price is pretty high here, but the quality is too. I'd especially be interested in a more recent bottling from this producer, as I got the impression that this may have been starting to fade, though it wasn't dead yet.

Chambourcin - Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, USA

noreply@blogger.com (Fringe Wine) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:29:00 +0000

I first had wine made from the Chambourcin grape at an airport. Many years ago, the airport in Charlotte, NC used to have a tiny little wine bar tucked away in one of its darker corners that focused exclusively on wines made in the state of North Carolina. During a layover there one year when I was flying to visit my parents, my wife and I spotted it and since it was much less crowded than any of the other airport bars, we decided to give it a shot. I was fairly ignorant about wine at the time and was looking more for a drink than anything else.

The pourer was very nice and knowledgeable, but most importantly he was very patient. He was clearly used to people seeing North Carolina wines as a kind of novelty and he seemed determined to try and change that perception. The little wine bar offered several different flight options that covered a wide variety of styles made within the state, and I remembered being very impressed with many of the wines on offer. At the time, I knew just enough to know that North Carolina wasn't exactly a wine powerhouse, but I didn't know enough to be predisposed to the idea of North Carolina wine one way or the other, which it turns out is a pretty good way to discover an awful lot of things.

One of the wines that we enjoyed and ended up buying a bottles of was a Chambourcin. At the time, of course, I didn't know the different between Sangiovese and Sauvignon Blanc, and I had no idea that Chambourcin was anything other than a regular old wine grape. I always remembered it, though, as it made a very favorable impression on me at the time, and I was a little vexed that I couldn't find anything called Chambourcin at my local wine shops. Over time, as I became more experienced with wine, I started to understand that Chambourcin wasn't just any old grape, and today I'd like to tell you a little more about it.

Chambourcin is one of the French Hybrids, so called because, well, they were created in France. See, after phylloxera devastated the European vines in the mid 18th Century, the French were desperately trying to find some way to keep their wine industry afloat while combating the tiny louse. The major French agricultural research schools were devoting nearly all of their time and resources to understanding and defeating phylloxera, but many growers still had to earn a living, so they turned to Native American varieties as a stop-gap measure, since many of those grapes were naturally resistant to the louse. It turned out that the Native American grapes have a particular kind of aroma and taste derisively referred to as "foxiness" that the European palate could not adjust to, and it was quickly realized that pure Native American varieties were not going to be the long-term answer. Many private growers began to experiment with crossing the European vinifera varieties with these Native American species to see if perhaps they could breed some of the unwelcome flavors out while retaining many of the positive features of the grapes, such as their resistance to disease and their high levels of productivity.

Depending on your perspective, their results were either incredibly successful or incredibly dismaying. They did succeed in creating many different hybrid species that lacked the signature foxiness of their Native American forbears, but the resulting species were (and for the most part still are) still considered vastly inferior to their European forbears. The growers loved the hybrid grapes because they didn't have to spend as much money on pesticides and fungicides and the crops that the hybrids produced were heavy and profitable. The hybrids were especially popular in northern France where the climate is marginal for vinifera grapes for the most part, but where the hybrids and their cold-hardiness thrived. The French government wasn't too happy about it, as the booming hybrid production in northern France affected the prices for much of the bulk wine produced in southern France, and they decided to do something about it. In the 1950's and 60's, France outlawed the use of hybrids in any designated French wine, meaning that producers could not (and still cannot) even use the lowly vin de table designation for their wines with hybrid grapes in them. From a peak of nearly 1,000,000 acres of hybrids planted in France in 1958, the total has fallen to under 50,000 acres today.

Despite what many of them would have you believe, the French are not the only people on Earth who grow grapes and make wine, though, and many of the French hybrids are still in use today in European countries like Germany and the UK that have many areas that are too cold to reliably grow vinifera grapes. The hybrids also found a home in the United States in areas where the climactic conditions are too extreme for vinifera cultivation (namely, anywhere that isn't on the west coast). The criticisms of wines made from these grapes are still around and are still mostly salient, though, as the wines produced from them are never going to have the depth and complexity of the finest wines in the world, but growers and producers in many of these regions just don't have any other viable options. It's not just that vinifera grapes wouldn't fully ripen in many of these areas, it's that the climactic conditions may actually kill the vinifera vines, and it takes time and money to replant and regrow vines after they die. I'm not defending hybrids planted absolutely everywhere, but I am saying that they aren't absolute evil wherever they pop up, and if you run across one, approach it with an open mind and you may be surprised.

Chambourcin is one of the hybrids that it is worth taking a chance on. It is widely regarded as one of the better French hybrids, and it still is the third most planted grape in the Muscadet region of France (though I have no idea what they do with the grapes there). It was created in the 1860's by a French hybridizer named Joannes Seyve who must not have kept very good records, as the grape's exact parentage is a mystery (it is though to be a crossing between a Seibel crossing and another of Joannes Seyve's hybrids, but this far removed from the process, it is virtually impossible to say with any certainty). It is also known as "Joannes Seyve 26-205," but some official French body changed it to the much snappier Chambourcin. It was not commercially available until 1963, for some reasonIt has a fairly long growing season and isn't as cold hardy as many of the hybrids are, so it tends to be planted in warmer areas.

The wine bar in the Charlotte airport closed a year or two after I first discovered it, and I don't trust my notes on the wine I had to be of any value at this point in time, so unfortunately I won't be writing about that experience. A few years later, though, I was visiting my sister in law in Philadelphia and I wandered into the Clover Hill Winery shop in the King of Prussia mall (which has also, sadly, closed, though the winery is still in business). I was very excited to see that they made a Chambourcin, so I picked up their 2008 offering for about $15. In the glass, the wine was a deep purple-ruby color that was opaque nearly all the way out to the rim (Chambourcin is well-known for its deeply colored wines). The nose was nicely aromatic with black cherry, spice box, blackberry and toasty vanilla notes. It had a lot of oak character to it, which had me a little on edge at this point. On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acid and low tannins. There were tart blackberry, sour cherry and raspberry flavors with some baking spice, charcoal and smoke. The wine was very tart and surprisingly thin, and the oak influence was very noticeable. Overall, it was clunky and out of balance, I thought, and needed more weight on the palate to carry the oak that it was richly covered in. It had a good amount of complexity, but ultimately was just an OK wine. There are much better examples of this grape out there, and I'd encourage you to visit your local winery and see if they are doing anything with this grape. Even if they aren't, visit your local winery anyway and discover what kind of treasures your backyard may have to offer.