Fringe Wine

Stuff that's not really about wine

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 20:08:00 +0000

Hi.

Since my last post, I have sporadically received emails and various other social media communiques from readers asking how I'm doing and I've not done a very good job responding to those people. For the most part, I just haven't had any good news to report and didn't want to lie, but also felt kind of awkward sending people gloomy emails. I have wanted to thank them, though, for thinking about me and for sending me such lovely, encouraging, thoughtful messages.

The frequency of these messages has picked up in the last week or so, and so I had a look and noticed that my last post was just over a year ago. I knew it had been some time last summer, but I didn't know exactly when, and I certainly didn't know that the post's anniversary had come and gone.

I have been debating writing an update to that post for a month or two, and I guess I've finally decided to do it. I wasn't sure if I wanted to for pretty much the same reasons I didn't get back to a lot of people who wrote to me. Also, it felt (and still kind of feels, to be honest) a little self-indulgent, and I wasn't sure if anybody really cared or wanted to hear about any of it. I suppose those who don't and/or won't can move along at any time, though.

In short, things have changed very little. There have been parcels of time where things were OK and I'm sure a few times where things were probably good, but on the whole, I've not been well. I've lost close to 80 pounds throughout this stretch, which, to be honest, is something I probably needed to do anyway. To those looking for a new weight-loss method, though, I don't recommend this one.

I've been drinking very little wine over the past year, and even less unusual wine. I've bought very little wine. I've read very little about wine. The feeling I used to get when I'd talk about or think about or drink wine is gone. It's gone from pretty much everything, honestly. Everything is just stuff. And I feel the same kind of empty, but somehow really heavy with pretty much all of it.

Drinking less wine didn't necessarily meaning drinking less in general, unfortunately. It never got to a point where it was pathological, but it did start to get to a point where it felt necessary and like it was the best part of my day. Around February, I decided it was time to take a break for alcohol for awhile.

Also around this time, I started seeing a new psychiatrist, since my old one had retired. He took a look at my file and listened to me as I filled in the parts from before I moved up here and sort of looked at me and said, "so, now what?" There are very few psychotropic medications that I've not been on at one time or another. Many of them I've been on more than once. At best, they've done nothing for me. At worst they've made me aggressive or numb or suicidal. I told him I didn't know what to do now. I didn't know what kinds of options there might still be.

"Have you tried ECT?"

I sat and looked at the floor for a few moments. For those who don't know, ECT stands for electro convulsive therapy and is essentially the more humane and much safer ancestor of what they used to call shock therapy. They put you under and hook up some electrodes to your head and pass a brief pulse of electricity through you. This little zap induces a seizure which only lasts a few minutes. After a few of these, you're supposed to feel better. Nobody really understands why, but it seems to work an awful lot of the time and sometimes works within a session or two (though more often after a few sessions).

It had come up at various points in the past, but was something that I had always refused to go through. I had been concerned that it would wipe out my personality or turn me into a zombie or obliterate my memory and however bad I had been feeling, I felt like it wasn't worth any of that. Over the past few years, though, I gradually started to open up to the possibility, and for the first time, I felt like whatever bad thing might happen, it couldn't be worse than this.

I was referred to a doctor who ran an ECT clinic at a local hospital and after a lot of health checks, I went in for my first session around March. They started me on a trial of unilateral ECT three times a week, which means that they only sent the pulse into one of the hemispheres of my brain (the right one) rather than across both hemispheres (which is called bilateral).

For those wondering what it's like, you show up to the clinic and they take you back to the little room where they do it. This particular one was laid out like a tiny ER with a number of different beds all in the same room separated by privacy curtains. They made me take my shoes off and lie down, and then they hooked me up to all the vital sign measuring stuff, as well as putting a blood pressure cuff on my ankle. They asked me standard questions to make sure I was the right person and that I knew where I was and what was going on. They stuck an IV in my hand, and then I waited for the doctor to make his way over to me. In the meantime, I could hear him talking to the other patients and could hear the other patients going through the procedure, which didn't sound like very much.

Once the doctor made his way to me, he asked me a few questions about how I was feeling and then was ready to go. There were a few nurses along with him as well as an anesthesiologist. Everybody got in their positions and they took my glasses off. One of the nurses inflated the blood pressure cuff on my ankle, they put a plastic breathing mask on my mouth and nose, and then the anesthesiologist started the medication drip. They give you a short-acting general anesthetic (propofol, in this case, which really hurts as it goes in) as well as a muscle relaxant so that when you go into seizure, you don't actually thrash around. The blood pressure cuff is there to stop the muscle relaxant from reaching your foot so that when you have a seizure, your foot actually twitches a bit so the doctor can see (I was hooked up to an EEG as well).

The breathing mask smelled and tasted like filling up a brand new inter-tube, and I had to take deep breaths while being gently talked to by the anesthesiologist. The medicine hurt and made my arm ache as it went in and after a few minutes, my eyes got really heavy and everything went black. I'd wake up a few minutes later, after it was all over, and sometimes I'd remember still being in the bed and being asked what my name was and what the date was and where I was (they won't let you leave until you get these questions right) and sometimes I wouldn't remember until I was being passed off to my wife back in the waiting room. I felt foggy and heavily drugged and usually had a slight headache, but not much more than that.

I did the unilateral three times a week for a week or two and didn't feel any better, so they started me on a trial of bilateral twice a week. I wasn't really getting much out of the bilateral at first, but after a few weeks, things started picking up a little bit. They then moved me to once weekly sessions and things started to slip. Rather than increase the frequency, though, they moved the sessions to two weeks apart, and everything pretty much slid right back to where it was. In late June, I stopped the treatments. A typical course of ECT is around 15 sessions and I had undergone close to 30.

I had thought before the treatments started that I could maybe still go to work on days I wasn't receiving treatments, but the sessions took so much out of me and made my head so foggy that I could do little more than watch TV on those days. It seriously affected my memory, but in odd ways. I remember a lot of things from right before each session began, but I apparently saw movies and television shows after the treatments that I have absolutely no memory of at all. I was out of work for about three months and have only been back about two months full time and am still having some difficulties. I was only able to drive my car again a week or so ago, and still feel uncomfortable about long drives.

ECT is very effective for a lot of people, but it didn't work for me. I've continued seeing a therapist and continued taking the medications my psychiatrist has prescribed, but I've started to lose hope. After a few months of not drinking, I've picked it up again. I know it's not good for me and it's not helpful to any of this, but I don't really care.

The point of all this, for the most part, is to say thank you to everyone through the years for reading this site and for commenting and for being so nice via email or twitter or facebook or in person or whatever. Thank you for your concern recently while all of this was going on. I've appreciated every kind word that's been sent my way, even if I didn't have the energy or emotional capacity to let you know directly. I've learned a lot while doing this and I hope that I've been able to share some of that knowledge with others in a way that is interesting and entertaining and that made people want to seek out and try some of these wines.

This is my last update to Fringe Wine, though. I'm not going anywhere, but I'm not going to be coming back here any more. I'm going to keep doing what my doctors tell me and see where that leads me, but it really looks and feels to me at this point like it leads in a different direction than this.

So thank for reading everyone. Goodbye.

An Update on the Lack of Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 19:15:00 +0000

A few months ago, I took a trip up to Montreal with the Taste Camp crew to sample the wines of south-eastern Canada. It was a fun trip, and I came back from it with a few dozen new grapes and a case and a half of wine to write about. I was excited, and started working my way through the bottles as soon as I got home.

I got through a few of them over the course of a week or so, and some of them were good and some weren't, but all of them were interesting in some way.

And then one night I went into the kitchen, and reached for a liquor bottle instead of a wine bottle. I had had a rough day and just didn't feel like I had it in me to give a bottle of wine the attention and focus that it deserved. My days had been getting rougher with more frequency over the period of a few weeks, and I thought maybe unwinding with some brandy would help me recharge my batteries a little bit and I could come at the wine fresh the next day.

The next day was worse. It wasn't that bad things were happening to me during the day, it's just that I felt kind of awful for a higher and higher percentage of each day. That night I bypassed the wine again and went back into the liquor cabinet. Tomorrow's another day.

But it wasn't, or at least it wasn't in any positive sense. And neither were any of the ones that followed it. Every day the amount of time I felt OK versus the amount of time I felt awful shifted a little bit more to the awful side. The bad stretches got longer and longer until at some point that's all there was.

My appetite was gone. I was sleeping poorly when I slept. None of the things I had previously enjoyed doing seemed worth doing anymore. I felt terrible about everything all the time. All I wanted to do was kill time as quickly as possible until I could go to sleep again.

I'm not a stranger to depression. I've lived with it off and on for as long as I can remember. Most of the time, the downs are just a little down and don't last very long. This was a big one. Is a big one.

It fills up everything. It gets into your senses and changes how everything looks and feels and tastes. It gets inside you and spreads out until it's covering everything, and it somehow continues to grow until it feels like it must start to leak out of your pores any day now.

It takes away the things you love and your drive by removing your capacity to love and your capacity for action. It's a grief with no cause and a pain with no source or location. Nothing makes it better. Nothing makes it go away. You wake up in the morning and it's waiting for you at the foot of your bed. And somehow it's gotten bigger in the night, and it grabs you a little harder every day.

So, this project, and many others, have gone on the back burner. I can't think about anything but this right now. I'm using all my energy to get from one day to the next. Right now, I believe that it will eventually get tired of me and move along. That's the only thing I know I have to hold onto no matter what.

I started this project a few years ago in an attempt to occupy myself during another particularly nasty time in my life. It was interesting and it engaged me and I learned a lot of really cool things in the process. Those wines and this site helped me get back on balance at a time when I was in danger of losing control. Wine has helped stabilize me at several different times in my life.

I don't know if it's eventually going to be the answer this time, but it's not the answer right now.

So that's why there hasn't been anything new here. And why there may not be for awhile. I really hope it's temporary and I'll have the energy and ability to continue with this very soon. I don't know how soon. I don't know if ever.

Thanks to everyone for reading. I hope you'll hear from me before too long.

Avgoustiatis - Ilia, Peloponnesos, Greece

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 30 May 2013 19:13:00 +0000

A few months ago, I was invited to a trade tasting of Greek wines. The wines were from the portfolio of Athenee Importers, while the tasting itself was hosted at the offices of Winebow in Somerville. I don't get a lot of invites to trade tastings and I don't end up going to most of the few that I'm actually invited to. I have a day job that generally conflicts with the timing of these things, and, furthermore, it's hard for me to find a tasting that I think might have stuff I can use for this site. On top of that, I don't really believe in reviewing wines that I've only tasted in a walkaround wine tasting environment. I think that large-scale tastings are important, but are really only useful for helping me to identify wines that I'd like to spend a bit more time with. The average person doesn't drink 50 different wines in a night and so I feel like whatever conclusions I draw from tasting in that particular environment are limited. I like to drink wines that I review at home with food in order to really give them a chance to show their stuff.

It can be difficult to get full bottles to take home from trade tastings, though, so as I said above, I don't usually go to very many of them. This particular tasting and the organizers behind it (Stephanie Teuwen and her team at Teuwen Communications) did a really great job of helping me get my hands on some sample bottles of really interesting wine that I was able to try there. The room was full of great producers and really cool wines, but I picked out about a half dozen bottles that really intrigued me and Winebow was generous enough to get me some samples. Today I'd like to take a look at just one of the cool grapes that I sampled at that tasting, but I'll be covering the other bottles in a future Odds and Ends post.

The grape I'd like to take a look at today is called Avgoustiatis. Avgoustiatis takes its name from the Greek word for the month of August, Αύγουστος (which I think is pronounced like "avgustos"), because that's the month that the grapes get ripe. It is found primarily on the western coast of the Peloponnesos and on an island called Zakynthos (which is part of the Ionian islands, where Avgoustiatis is the second most widely planted red grape) just offshore, but Wine Grapes, for unstated reasons, claims that it is likely from the Cyclades Islands originally, which are southwest of the Peloponnesos and just north of Crete. Wine Grapes also claims that there is a possible parent/offspring relationship between Avgoustiatis and Mavrodaphne and cites as their source the Master's thesis of Mihalis Boutaris, published in 2000. Boutaris's thesis is not available publicly, but he was kind enough to send me a copy of it a few months ago, and when I checked his research, his findings actually showed that Avgoustiatis and Mavrodaphne were genetically identical at the 8 microsatellite loci he examined.

Avgoustiatis and Mavrodaphne are considered separate cultivars by pretty much everybody, so I emailed Mihalis about his curious finding. He assured me that the two cultivars are distinct and can be discriminated ampelographically and physiologically and having tasted wines made from each of these grapes, I'm inclined to believe him, since they are very different from one another. It is curious, though, because his paper actually had six total samples, four of Mavrodaphne, one of Avgoustiatis and one of something called Agustiatico, which he says is a clone of Mavrodaphne. The sample of Avgoustiatis came from Mercouri Estate, whose wines I'll actually be looking at below. The samples of Mavrodaphne and of Agustiatico all came from university and national germplasm collections, except for one, which came from Mercouri as well. The mostly likely explanations are either Mercouri sent a mislabeled sample, or a labeling error occurred at some point during the experiment. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any other studies with genetic information on Avgoustiatis, so it doesn't look like we have the scientific information available to draw any firm conclusions.*

I was able to try two different wines made from the Avgoustiatis grape, one of which I purchased locally and one of which was a sample from the show I attended. The first was the 2005 "Antares" from Mercouri Estate, which is a blend of (I think) about 80% Avgoustiatis and 20% Mourvedre that is aged for about a year in oak. I picked it up for about $30 from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet. In the glass the wine was a fairly deep brickish red color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of black cherry, plum, sweaty leather, smoke and animal funk. On the palate the wine was full bodied with medium acidity and medium, chunky tannins. There were flavors of smoke, graphite, leather, black cherry, cedar wood, espresso and meat. It was dark and savory with a lot of earthy, funky animal notes to it. These are a major hallmark of the Mourvedre grape, and I found myself wondering how much of the finished wine's character was due to Mourvedre and how much was coming from Avgoustiatis.

Fortunately, I was able to get my hands on a bottle of the 2009 Mercouri Estate Avgoustiatis, which is 100% Avgoustiatis. This wine was provided to me as a sample, so I'm not sure exactly what the retail price on it is. They only make about 2,000 bottles of it per year, though, so it may be hard to lay hands on. In the glass this wine was a fairly deep brickish ruby color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of smoke, black cherry, and blackberry with a little meatiness and a little sweatiness to it as well. On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tight, grippy tannins. There were flavors of black cherry, blackberry, spicy plum, smoke and charred meat. There was a little bit of animal funk to it, but it was really dominated by smoke and plummy fruit. Having tasted this wine, I understood why the winemaker would think that Avgoustiatis would play well with Mourvedre. They have a lot of similarities, but Mourvedre seems to be a little earthier and funkier while Avgoustiatis is a little fruitier and smokier. Both wines were very good, though, and would be outstanding with grilled red meats (especially lamb).

*I'm not really interested in getting into all this again, but I do want to mention to first time visitors that this is one of the biggest problems I have with Wine Grapes (read all about it here). Much of the information is good, but a lot of findings are misreported or mis-cited by the authors, and I find that when I do my due diligence and follow up on some of the citations, the original paper isn't saying anything like what the authors of Wine Grapes are reporting. If one were simply reading Boutaris's thesis, the conclusion one would come to about Avgoustiatis and Mavrodaphne is not that they had a parent-offspring relationship, but rather that they were actually the same grape. I'm not sure how they got to the conclusion they got to given the actual information at hand, but it's turning out to be a recurring problem with the book.

Marquette - Minnesota, USA

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:48:00 +0000

*The story below first ran in the Midwest Wine Press about two weeks ago. I have added a review of a wine that I was able to try from the grape, but the bulk of the article has remained unchanged, with only a few additions and minor edits. Mark runs a great site over at MWP and I'd encourage everyone to go check it out*

For the most part, the wines that you drink today are made from the same grapes as the wines your grandparents and great-grandparents drank. The great wine grapes of the world have been around for several hundred years, and some of them for much longer than that. For example, the Georgian grape Rkatsiteli is thought by some authorities to date back to 3000 BC, while the Greek grape Limnio was reputedly mentioned by Aristotle and Hesiod in ancient Greece. Those are extreme examples, but even Chardonnay can be traced back to the 16th Century while Cabernet Sauvignon was first mentioned in the late 18th Century.

And then you have a grape like Marquette. Marquette (named for 17th Century Jesuit missionary/explorer Père Marquette) has only been available to the public since 2006, though the original cross responsible for creating it happened in 1989. It was created by Peter Hemstad and James Luby at the University of Minnesota, which has become one of the foremost cold-hardy grape breeding facilities in the United States. Marquette is a complex hybrid grape, which just means that it has more than two different grape species in its lineage. A simple hybrid would be the result of a crossing between two grapes that were of different species and which had no other species in its parentage. A pure Vitis vinifera crossed with a pure Vitis labrusca would produce a simple hybrid. If we crossed this simple hybrid with a pure Vitis aesitvalis, the resulting offspring would have three different species of grapes in its lineage and it would be a complex hybrid. Marquette actually has eight different Vitis species in its lineage. In addition to Vitis vinifera, there is also Vitis riparia, labrusca, aestivalis, lincecumii, rupestris, cinera, andberlandieri, all of which are different North American species of grapevine.

The pedigree map below is not complete, but it does show some interesting relationships in Marquette’s close family tree. Marquette is the result of crossing MN 1094 with Ravat 262, neither of which are commercially important in their own right, but we can see that Ravat 262 is a direct offspring of Pinot Noir, making Marquette a grandchild of Pinot. On the other side of the tree, we can see a few commercial hybrids (Landot Noir, for example) and another vinifera variety, Schiava Grossa, as Marquette’s great-great-great grandparent. It was also pointed out in the MWP comments section that if you trace MN 1019's pedigree a little farther back, you'll find Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in there as well. Marquette is also a cousin of Frontenac, another University of Minnesota cold-climate creation, though I’m not exactly sure where Frontenac would fit in on the pedigree chart.

Though Marquette is a very young grape, it is proving popular with growers in cold climate states. Minnesota leads the way with just over 200 acres planted (as of 2007, but this figure is almost certainly higher today), but there were also about 10 acres planted in Indiana as of 2010 and 6 acres in Iowa as of 2006. It is prized in these areas because it is extremely cold hardy, regularly tolerating temperatures between -20º and -30º Fahrenheit (and at least one report of a vine surviving -36º conditions with no injury). It does bud early, which can be a problem in frost-prone areas, but secondary buds can also be fairly productive. It has good resistance to downy mildew, powdery mildew, and black rot and ripens around mid-September in central Minnesota. The grape is typically made into a dry table wine that is characterized by black fruit and earthy notes with some “typical hybrid” aromas and flavors as well. The grape can suffer from high acidity when picked, but malolactic fermentation and barrel ageing can help to keep this in check in the finished wine.

One of the interesting “side effects” of Marquette’s being such a young grape is that the University of Minnesota actually has a patent on it, and those interested in growing the vine must buy their planting materials from a nursery licensed to sell them by the University. Furthermore, individuals are not permitted to asexually propagate their vines without a license from the University. Think of it like a modern best-selling novel. You can buy the book from a bookstore or borrow it from a library, but you can’t make copies of it and sell them to your friends. Chardonnay, on the other hand, is public domain, and while you can go down to the bookstore and buy a copy of it, there are other free(and legal) ways to get your hands on (and share) the materials as well. Whether Marquette will stick around long enough to become a “world classic” like Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon is something that only time will tell.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2010 Winehaven Marquette Reserve from their website for about $25 (they don't ship to Massachusetts, but they were able to ship to my brother in another state). Winehaven is located in Minnesota, about 35 miles north of Minneapolis. I picked up a few wines from them that I hope to write about in the next few weeks. In the glass the wine was a fairly deep purple-ruby color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of crushed wild berries, red cherry, raspberry, black plum, redcurrant and semi-sweet chocolate. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and very low, soft tannins. There were flavors of smoky black plum, baking chocolate, black cherry and black pepper. The wine clocks in at 13.9% alcohol, but wears it kind of clumsily and comes across a little hot and off-balance. There was something vaguely and distantly foxy on the nose and the palate, but it's not a foxy wine, if that makes any sense. Overall, it's a fairly nice wine, especially considering the challenges of ripening grapes in the unforgiving climate of Minnesota.

The Wines of Vino Z Czech - Moravia, Czech Republic

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:18:00 +0000

A few months ago, I received an email from a guy named Noah who said he had stumbled across my site and had some wines that he thought I'd be interested to try. He and his wife had recently started a wine importing company that was focused solely on wines from the Czech Republic and he was wondering if that might be something that would be up my alley. I had never had a wine from the Czech Republic before, so I told him I'd be delighted to give the wines a shot. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Welschriesling wines from their portfolio, but today I'd like to tell you a little bit about Vino z Czech and also a little bit about Czech Wine in general.

Noah Ullman worked for years in the eastern European branch of a major US software company. He spent some time working the Czech Republic and would occasionally go out for a few drinks with his coworkers after a long day. Most of the people would drink beer on these excursions, but Noah noticed that one of his Czech coworkers, Radim, always ordered wine. The Czech Republic is generally known as a beer drinking and beer producing country, so Noah was intrigued by Radim's beverage choice. When he asked him about it, Radim replied "I am from Moravia. We drink wine in Moravia." Noah visited some Moravian wineries with Radim and fell in love with the wines there. When he returned to the United States, he found that Czech wines were virtually impossible to find here, so he decided to change that.

Noah and his wife started Vino z Czech a year or so ago as a way to get Czech wines on US shelves. Their model is a little bit different than most importers. Radim is their exporter, and they consult with leading Czech sommeliers to try to find the top estate bottled wines in the country. They work with a handful of producers, but as you will see below, all of the wines are bottled under the blanket Vino z Czech brand, and the specific producer is mentioned on the foil cap and the back label of each wine only. The front labels pretty much give the name of the grape used (all of their bottlings are varietal wines right now) and have different paintings by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, who you can read more about here.

I mentioned above that the Czech Republic is primarily associated with beer, but viticulture in the Moravian region can be traced back to the Romans around the second century AD. Recently, a Roman outpost was uncovered near the town of Pasohlávky that contained many viticultural artifacts, and it is thought by some historians that Grüner Veltliner and Welschriesling were probably introduced into the area during the Roman occupation. Many of the French and German varieties (like Pinot Blanc and Riesling) were probably introduced into the area around the 13th Century as monasteries with monks from those countries settled into the region. More vineyards were gradually planted over the next few centuries, but then the 30 Years War (1618-1648) wiped many of them out. They were slowly replanted and the area received a major boost from the creation of a handful of wine academies during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but then Phylloxera first struck in the vineyards in 1890 and wreaked havoc on the area over the next 15 years.

During much of this time, the region was actually a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but in 1918, the nation of Czechoslovakia (which contained the modern-day Czech Republic, Slovakia and a bit of land currently in Russia) declared its independence and became a sovereign state. It was annexed by Germany in 1938 and was part of Nazi Germany until 1945. Following World War II, Czechoslovakia became a communist state, which is generally not all that beneficial for a country's wine industry (as we saw when we took a look at the Pinela grape). The Communist government in Czechoslovakia was overthrown in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the country peacefully split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic (also known as Slovkia) in 1993. In 1995, the Czech Republic passed Wine Act No. 115/1995 in an attempt to establish wine laws that would bring the country's wine industry into line with the rest of the EU. The Czech Republic formally joined the EU in 2004 and passed Wine Act No. 321/2004, which brought their regulations into line with the rest of Europe. The Czech Republic's classification system is more closely related to that of Germany and Austria, where ripeness level at harvest is the primary determinant for quality level classification. There is also a geographical classification ranging from Region, to Sub-Region, to Village to Vineyard (for details on Czech wine law, you can read more here).

Map of Czech Republic with Moravia in red

Moravia is by far the most important wine making region in the Czech Republic, accounting for 96% of the total vineyard area of the country (there are some vines in Bohemia, towards the northwest of the country, but they are scattered and make up a minor part of the industry). Most of the production is located around the River Dyje in Moravia, and there are four main sub-regions: Mikulovská, Znojemská, Velkopavlovická, and Slovaká (more information about these regions can be found here). There really is no single dominant variety in the region, and most of the grapes grown have been brought in from other countries. For white varieties, Müller-Thurgau leads the way with 11.2% of total plantings, followed by Grüner Veltliner with 11%, Welschriesling with 8.5%, Riesling with 7%, Pinot Blanc with 5%, Sauvignon Blanc with 5% and Chardonnay with 4% (among others). For red vines, St. Laurent is the most widely planted grape with 9% of total plantings, followed by Blaufrankish at 5.6%, Zweigelt at 4.7%, Pinot Noir at 4% and Blauer Portugieser at 3.9%.

Vino z Czech sent me eight total wines to sample, all of which were white. I took a look at their two Welschriesling wines a few days ago, and interested readers can check those reviews out here. The other six wines, made from the Riesling, Grüner Veltliner, Rivaner (Müller-Thurgau), Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Blanc grapes, are reviewed below. All of the wines were from the Moravia region of the Czech Republic, but I'm not sure about sub-regions or anything more specific. These wines are available online here. Again, these bottles were sent to me as samples for review and I was not compensated in any way for these reviews other than with the bottles themselves.

The first Vino z Czech wine that I tried was the 2011 Riesling from the Michlovsky vineyard. This wine is available from their online retailer for $19. In the glass the wine was a fairly light silvery lemon color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of peach, pear, lime peel, lemon, white flowers, honey and chalk. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with high acidity. It was dry with racy lemon-lime citrus, white peach, and honeysuckle flower with clean, stony minerals on the finish. It was a bit tight and austere right out of the bottle, but with a little time and a little increase in temperature, the hard citrus fruits opened up into more stone fruit and honey. It is drinking well right now, but it is definitely the kind of wine I'd like to be able to revisit in a few years, as I feel like it has the structure to stand up to a few years in the bottle. Fans of Austrian Riesling will definitely find a lot to like here, though fans of softer, sweeter Rieslings may want to look elsewhere for their fix.

Next up was the 2011 Sauvignon Blanc, which was also from the Michlovsky vineyard. Retail on this bottle is also $19 online. In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of white grapefruit, grapefruit peel, cut grass, cat pee and green melon (in other words, it was a classic Sauvignon Blanc nose). On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity. There were flavors of white grapefruit, grapefruit peel, white pear, lemon, tart pineapple, cut grass, green bell pepper, chalk and clean river stones. The palate was also full of classic Sauvignon Blanc flavors, but it was backed with a really nice minerality that I found in many of these wines. This wine was much closer stylistically to French Sauvignon Blanc from Sancerre or other parts of the Loire Valley than to the leaner, grassier New Zealand or the big, fleshy California Sauvignon Blancs out there. I thought it was an excellent wine and would have no problem shelling out $20 for it.

Next on the list was the 2011 Rivaner from Chateau Valtice ($16). Rivaner is just another name for Müller-Thurgau which hearkens back to the days when it was thought to be the result of a crossing between Riesling and Sylvaner (it isn't, as we learned). The term Rivaner still hangs around, though Müller-Thurgau is really the most accurate name. In the glass, the wine was a medium silvery lemon color. The nose was fairly light and subtle with aromas of pear, golden apple, grapefruit and white peach. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. It was maybe just a touch off-dry with flavors of white peach, pink grapefruit, pear, golden apple and honeysuckle flower. It was a mild, delicate, subtle wine that did resemble Riesling to some extent, but with the volume turned down. My primary concern with this wine is that it is bottled with a synthetic (plastic) cork, so if you decide to try a bottle, get the newest vintage you can and drink it as soon as possible. I have found that wines under this type of closure go downhill much faster than those under screwcap or traditional cork.

The 2011 Grüner Veltliner from Michlovsky was next out of the box, and it retails for about $16 online. In the glass the wine was a medium silvery lemon color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of lemon, white peach, braised celery, grass and grapefruit. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of white pear, lemon peel, grapefruit, braised celery, cracked white pepper and a mild, stony mineral finish. If you inserted this wine into a blind tasting of Austrian Grüners, I think you'd probably have a tough time singling it out. Grüner can make a big, powerful wine, but it can also make something a little more delicate, and this wine definitely falls into that latter category. There were really nice savory notes that would help this wine complement a variety of vegetable dishes, especially those with bell peppers or summer squash. It's not something that I would try to cellar, though, so drink it early and drink it often.

Vino z Czech offers two wines made from the Pinot Blanc grape from two different producers. The first one I tried was their 2009 offering from the Vyskocil vineyard ($22). It can be difficult to tell some of these wines apart just from their front labels, and for the two Pinot Blancs, I had to use the alcohol content on the front to differentiate the two (this one was 13.5% while the other was 13%). In the glass, the wine was a medium lemon gold color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of apricot, coconut, pineapple and green melon with a touch of butter and vanilla (there is some oak going on here). On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of lime, white peach, toasted coconut, and green melon with a steely mineral backbone. I am a big fan of Pinot Blanc and think it is one of the more underrated grape varieties out there, and this is a really nice example. It's very well balanced across the board and was really a pleasure to drink. A little bottle age probably wouldn't hurt it, but I wouldn't get too crazy with it.

Last but certainly not least is the 2009 Pinot Blanc from the Spielberg vineyard, which is Vino z Czech's top offering and costs about $38 a bottle. In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of brioche, baked apple, pineapple, butter, cheese, coconut and vanilla. On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of creamy golden apple, pear, toasty brioche, pineapple, toasted coconut, butter, lemon curd and vanilla. This wine also saw some time in oak, but again, I thought it carried it very well and the overall result was a lovely, balanced wine. As a personal preference, I'm not a big fan of oak in my white wines at all, so I found that I preferred the Vyskocil Pinot Blanc, but those who are more tolerant and/or enthusiastic about oaked white wines would be better served with this wine. It's not a style I typically enjoy, but I do recognize that it is a very good wine for those who like that kind of thing.

Overall, I was very impressed with the wines of Vino z Czech. Their offerings retained much of the classic characteristics of the grapes they are working with, but they also have a really lovely minerality that makes them distinctive and gives them a sense of place. I will confess that I was not optimistic when Noah first contacted me about trying his wines, but all of them were really lovely. They are just starting to bring some red wines that I hope to be able to try as well, and I will certainly write about them if I get a chance to try them. In the meantime, check out their site, try some Czech wines and na zdraví (to your health)!

Welschriesling/Olaszrizling/Graševina - Burgenland, Austria; Moravia, Czech Republic & Villány, Hungary

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 02 May 2013 19:42:00 +0000

Welschriesling is a hard grape to get a handle on. It goes by many different names in many different central European countries and though many of those names might lead you to believe it has certain relationships with other grapes, it actually doesn't. Today I'd like to try and sift through what we do and don't know about this grape before getting to a few different wines I've recently tried from it.

The first thing one must do when dealing with this particular grape is to sort through the various synonyms it is planted under. These synonyms fall into three broad categories:

1) The Welschriesling group. This group consists of the names Welschriesling (as it is known in Austria, Canada, parts of Germany and Switzerland), Wälschriesling (Germany), Laški Rizling (Slovenia, Croatia and parts of Serbia), Rizling Vlašský (Slovakia), or Ryzlink Vlašský (Czech Republic). In this group, Welsch, Wälsch, Laški and Vlašský all come from the same root word, but it isn't totally clear what that root word might be. The most likely explanation is that they come from the German word welsch which means "foreigner," and that the name of the grape therefore means something like "foreign Riesling," meaning that it probably came into Germany or Austria from abroad. Why and how the grape came to be identified with Riesling is unclear since Welschriesling bears no genetic, ampelographic or vinous relationship or similarity to Riesling. It has also been suggested that the Welsch- prefix means "from Wallachia," which is a wine-making region in Romania. This would be a possibility except for one thing...

2) In Romania, the grape is known as Italian Riesling, and variations on this name are found in a handful of other countries as well. In northeastern Italy, it is known as Riesling Italico and the Hungarian name Olaszrizling simply translates as "Italian Riesling." The grape was introduced into Italy in the 19th Century, but it has been grown elsewhere for longer than that. Since it is known as Italian Riesling in Romania, it seems reasonable to assume that the grape came into Romania from Italy, which would have had to have happened in the 19th Century or later. Given that the grape was known as Welschriesling before this time, it seems unlikely that the grape originated in Wallachia in Romania.

3) In Croatia, the grape is known as Graševina, or sometimes Graševina Bijela. I don't read or speak Croatian, but when I enter the word Graševina into Google translate, it is translated into the word "Riesling," which is really interesting (Bijela just means "white"). If Graševina translates as Riesling, then it would make sense for Germans to refer to it as "foreign Riesling" to differentiate it from their Riesling. Furthermore, Graševina is the most widely planted grape in Croatia, with over 21,000 acres devoted to the grape as of 2009. Wine Grapes concludes from all of this that Welschriesling likely originated from Croatia, and the evidence seems fairly convincing to me.

Welschriesling is shockingly widely planted throughout central Europe, but wines made from it are still difficult to find in the US. As mentioned above, it is Croatia's most widely planted grape, but it is also the most widely planted white grape of Hungary as well, accounting for just over 12,000 acres in 2008. It is the second most widely planted grape in Austria (behind Grüner Veltliner) with nearly 9,000 acres under vine, which is almost twice the amount of regular Riesling grown in that country. There are over 17,000 acres planted to the grape in Romania, 7,700 acres in Slovakia, 6,000 acres in Slovenia, 5,000 acres in Italy, and 3,000 acres in the Czech Republic. Somewhat surprsingly, a grape called Borba in Spain is genetically identical to Welschriesling, but there is only about 20 acres planted there.

Welschriesling is made into a wide range of styles, but the two most common are dry table wines and late harvest/botrytized sweet wines. I was able to try a variety of wines made from the grape from several different areas and in different styles. The first wine was the 2011 Gere Attila Pincészete Olaszrizling from the Villány region of Hungary (area 15 in red on this map). I picked this wine up from my friends at Blue Danube Wine for around $13. In the glass the wine was a fairly pale silvery lemon color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of apricot, pink grapefruit, pear and orange peel. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity. There were flavors of lemon peel, lemon water and pear. It was mild, delicate and subtle, but finished with a really strong, clean mineral note. It was light and fresh and just the kind of thing that I would reach for on a screaming hot summer's day. It's not going to blow your mind, but it does have its subtle charms.

I have recently met the acquaintance the man and wife importing team at Vino z Czech, which is one of the few (and possibly only) importing companies in the US bringing wines from the Czech Republic here. They sent me all of the white wines in their portfolio (as free samples, in the interest of full disclosure), and I will be writing about those wines, as well as writing more about their company and Czech wine in general, very soon. Two of the wines they sent me, though, were made from Welschriesling grown in the region of Moravia in the southeastern part of the Czech Republic. The first wine was the 2011 Spielberg Welschriesling, which can be purchased for around $20 a bottle here. In the glass, the wine was a medium lemon gold color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of white pear, golden apple, chalk and a touch of white flowers. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of lemon, green apple, pear and a touch of lees. It finished with a strong steely, chalky minerality. Right out of the bottle, the wine was lean, sharp and bright, but as it opens up, the flavor profile shifts from the sharp lemon to more of the soft white fruits. It stays light and crisp the whole time, though, and is very nice.

The second Vino z Czech Welschriesling was the 2011 Galant, also from Moravia, which retails for around $27 per bottle (about $24 with the case discount through their online retailer). You do have to really read the back labels with these wines since all of them look very similar to one another. Vino z Czech is a kind of umbrella brand that these guys are using, but all of the wines that they put out are from individual producers. Spielberg and Galant are two of the producers that they are working with, and the producer information is usually found on the foil cap and the back labels of these wines. In the glass, this wine was a medium lemon gold color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of white pear, orange peel, pineapple, Meyer lemon and cantaloupe. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. It was dry with flavors of white pear, lemon water, golden apple and river stones. Like the Hungarian wine above, this wine was subtle and delicate. My tasting note calls it "a light, lean wine with quiet citrus and white fruit wrapped around a clean, subtle mineral core." It wasn't as sharp and austere as its fellow countryman, but was still bright and zippy. It is just a lovely little wine that's shy and a little flirty at the same time.

The final wine that I tried was the 2006 Kracher Beerenauslese from the Burgenland region of Austria. This wine is made from 70% Welschriesling and 30% Chardonnay grapes that have been botrytized, and it cost about $25 for a half bottle (from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet). In the glasss the wine was a medium bronze gold color. The nose was intensely aromatic with beautiful aromas of honey, orange marmalade, pineapple, grapefruit, and mango. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity. It was very sweet with flavors of honey, candied pineapple, grapefruit curd, and orange marmalade. It had a curious bitter citrus pith kind of finish that was a bit unpleasant and unwelcome. It's a very good wine, but it really wasn't anything exceptionally exciting, though it is a decent value. Welschriesling isn't much of a blockbuster grape and I found that I enjoyed its subtle delicacy more in dry table wine form than in this more concentrated style. It felt a little bit like if the cute librarian you had a crush on showed up one day in a leather mini skirt and a tube top. She's still a lovely woman, but she doesn't strike your fancy in quite the same way.

Pinela - Vipavska Dolina, Slovenia

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:47:00 +0000

Image from Blue Danube Wine's website

It has been a few weeks since my last post and a lot has changed in that time. Regular readers are probably aware that I live and work in the Boston area, and anyone who has been near a television in the past week or so is surely aware of what happened between the marathon on Monday and the manhunt on Friday of last week. I was very fortunate to have been only indirectly affected by the bombing and its aftermath, but it was a very disruptive event in the lives of everyone in and around the city of Boston. Life is getting closer to normal every day, though, and part of that return process is getting back to the things we love to do. Tasting and writing about unusual wines is probably not all that important on a cosmic scale, but it is important in my own life and I hope it means at least a little to those who read regularly or sporadically. In that spirit, it's time to get back to the weird grapes by taking a little trip to Slovenia to try the Pinela grape.

Though today's wine is from Slovenia, it is thought that Pinela (under the name Pinella) is originally from Italy. It is first mentioned all the way back in 1324 in the Catalogo delle varietà delle vitis del Regno Veneto, where it was said to be used in the wines of Udine, Friuli. It should be mentioned, though, that some sources (here and here) indicate that Pinela is actually indigenous to Slovenia, and, further, that there hasn't been any DNA analysis done to see whether the Pinella of Friuli and the Pinela of Slovenia are actually the same grape. It seems reasonable to assume that the two are the same, since the region of Friuli borders Slovenia and many of the Slovenian regions where Pinela can be found. Both Wine Grapes and the VIVC list the two grapes as synonyms, and that's good enough for me right now. Whatever the case may be, Italy claimed 72 hectares of Pinella in their 2000 agricultural census, while Slovenia claimed 50 hectares of Pinela (or sometimes Pinjela) in their 2009 census. The grape does not appear to be grown anywhere else in the world.

Slovenian wines are somewhat difficult to find on American shelves, but they've been growing vines and making wines in Slovenia for a very long time. The Celts and Illyrians were making wine in the area known as modern-day Slovenia long before the Romans began introducing viticulture into the areas where France and Germany are now found. Slovenia's history is turbulent, as the area has been conquered and occupied by a number of different European powers throughout its history. It was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I, when the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs broke away and formed their own country. In 1928, this state merged with Serbia and in 1929, the country was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers in 1941 and control was divided between Germany, Italy and Hungary until 1945, when the Axis powers were defeated by the Allies.

After World War II, Yugoslavia became a communist state. Though not as restrictive as many of the other eastern-bloc communist governments, being a communist state had detrimental effects on the development of the wine industry. Josip Broz Tito was the leader of communist Yugoslavia until his death in 1980, at which point the political and economic climate of the region began to become less stable. In 1987, a group of Slovene intellectuals publicly began to call for Slovenia's independence from Yugoslavia and a movement towards democratization began in earnest. Several democratic amendments were passed in 1989, and in 1990, the Slovenian assembly changed the name of their region to the Republic of Slovenia. Later that year, 88% of the Slovenian electorate voted for a sovereign and independent Slovenia and the country became independent officially on June 25, 1991. The Yugoslav People's Army sent troops into the region on June 27 of that year and on July 7, a treaty was signed that ceased hostilities in the region. A new constitution was adopted in December of 1991 and the EU recognized Slovenia as an independent state in January of 1992, with the United Nations following suit in May of that year.

**UPDATE** An anonymous commenter has informed me that my understanding of post WWII, cold war era politics is a bit mistaken in the paragraph below. He/she says the following: "Just one note: Yugoslavia (including Slovenia), was not behind the iron-curtain. Yes, it was communist, but not part of the USSR controlled Warsaw-pact... What it meant in practice, was that free travel of people and goods was permitted and as such your statement incorrect that their position was like Romania, Hungary or Georgia. The first two were separate states behind the Iron Curtain, the latter was actually part of the USSR.
Your conclusions, that viticulture was falling behind modern standards remain correct. But the USSR had little to do with that. That was just the result of collective farming in a centrally governed market." I want to thank that commenter and I offer his/her gloss here in the main text in the hopes that it will help other readers. I'm not really sure how to fix my erroneous paragraph below, so I'm going to leave it as is so that the commenter's gloss makes sense in context.**

As we've seen with Romania and Georgia, spending time behind the Iron Curtain throughout the latter half of the 20th Century means that you were essentially isolated from the western World. There was not a lot of movement of ideas or commerce between communist and democratic nations. The former Soviet bloc countries have had to make up a lot of ground in a very small amount of time in order to carve out a presence in Western markets. The former Yugoslav republics and countries like Hungary have had a little bit better time of it because they are geographically closer to western Europe, making tourism easier, and because they were never as dependent on the USSR and post-Soviet Russia as countries like Georgia were. The degree of success that a given country has had following the end of the Cold War is, perhaps unsurprisingly, related to how well the country was functioning throughout the 20th Century, and while all of the former communist dictator states have had to play a bit of catch-up, some, like Slovenia, were better prepared and in a better position than others to do so relatively quickly.

All of which brings us back to Slovenian wine in general. Slovenia is just south of Austria, just east of Friuli in Italy, just north of Croatia and just west of Hungary. There are three major wine regions in Slovenia. Primorje is located in the western part of the country, just over the border from Italy, and this is where most of the wines that we see on US shelves come from. Brda is perhaps the most well known region within Primorje, but there is also Collio Goriziana (which is partly in Slovenia but which can be bottled as an Italian DOC), Koper and the Vipava Valley, where today's wine hails from. The other two major wine regions of Slovenia are located on the other side of the country with Podravje in the northeastern corner and Posavje in the southeast. Podravje (Drava Valley) is the largest of the three major regions of Slovenia and is known primarily for the production of white and sparkling wines. Posavje (Sava Valley) is the only major region to produce more red than white wine (as a nation, Slovenia's output is about 75% white), but much of the production here is of the bulk variety.

I was able to get my hands on a bottle of the 2008 Batič Pinela (100%) from the Vipavska Dolina region of Slovenia (map here). I bought the wine from the always excellent Blue Danube Wine Company for around $29. The first bottle that I ordered was corked, but Blue Danube quickly sent me a replacement. Pinela is a white grape, but this wine is made in an orange wine style, as the grapes are crushed and left to macerate on the skins for five days without any temperature control. Natural yeast fermentation is followed by 24 months of aging in old Slovenian oak barrels. The wine is bottled unfined, unfiltered (usually) and with minimal SO2 additions in the funky vessel seen at right. In the glass the wine was a medium golden bronze color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of dried apple, cider, pear, dried leaves, hay, autumn spice and bergamot. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of dried leaves, dried apple, autumn spice, hay, orange peel and toasted nuts. It clocks in at 14.5% alcohol and does wear it a little clumsily, but overall it was an absolutely wonderful wine. It's warm and spicy with a great autumn vibe that would be deliciously appropriate at Thanksgiving, but which I'd be happy to enjoy any time. It is best served no colder than cellar temp and in the company of valued family and friends.

Cayuga White - New Hampshire and Finger Lakes, New York, USA

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:19:00 +0000

One of the things that I really love about digging into some of these unusual grapes is learning how many of them are related to one another. For instance, I knew today's grape, Cayuga White, was a hybrid, but I didn't know anything about its parents or grandparents. I learned that it is the offspring of a Seyval Blanc x Schuyler crossing, which is kind of cool because I'm a little familiar with Seyval, but I didn't know anything about Schuyler. It turns out that Schuyler is itself a crossing of Zinfandel and another hybrid grape known as Ontario (which is a crossing of Winchell and Moore's Diamond). Which means that Cayuga is the offspring of Seyval Blanc, the grandchild of Zinfandel and the great-grandchild of Moore's Diamond, three very different grapes!

As with human beings, one can get into trouble expecting family members to closely resemble one another. Cayuga bears virtually no resemblance to Zinfandel, and though it can occasionally pick up some foxiness if allowed to over-ripen, it doesn't bear much resemblance to Moore's Diamond either. Interestingly, the two grapes that Cayuga is most often compared to are Riesling and Muscat, neither of which figure into its family history. Like Riesling and Muscat, Cayuga is often made into an off-dry or medium sweet wine, though it also makes interesting sparkling wines if harvested early enough. It is most heavily planted in New York state, where it covers just over 400 acres, but can also be found in the American Midwest and to a more limited extent in the northeastern US and southeastern Canada.

Cayuga was created in 1946 at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, by John Einset and Willard B. Robinson. It was selected from other seedlings in 1952 and was finally released in 1972 as "the first of a Finger Lakes series of wine grapes for New York." Cayuga was successful because it buds late and ripens early, which cuts off the extreme ends of the growing season. It is a heavily productive and vigorous vine that benefits from a discouraging hand in the vineyard. In fact, in 1964, a "25 variety trial" was undertaken to test the "most commercially promising American and French hybrid varieties and six new Geneva selections." The 25 selected vines were planted on three different sites in New York and various statistics were gathered about them over a period of several years. One of the statistics was total yield and Cayuga outperformed all of the other grapes in the trial in that category. It has decent disease and fungal resistance, but only moderate cold-hardiness, which has prevented it from becoming more popular with growers.

I was able to try two different wines from the Cayuga White grape. The first was a NV wine from Jewell Towne Vineyards in New Hampshire. Jewell Towne is the oldest winery in New Hampshire, though they only opened in 1994. The owner, Peter Oldak, has been growing grapes on the property since 1982, when he planted six vines on a hobbyist lark. By 1990, he was growing over 60 different varieties and decided to teach himself how to make wine. He made a few vintages for other wineries but decided to open his own winery in 1994. His debut vintage was only 40 cases which sold out in three weeks. Today, Jewell Towne produces over 7000 cases per year and is really the first name in New Hampshire wine today. I picked this wine up at a state store in Nashua for around $12. In the glass the wine was a very pale silvery lemon color that was almost water-white. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of peach, grapefruit, pineapple, pear and cheese. On the palate the wine was light bodied with medium acidity. It was medium sweet with flavors of mandarin orange, pineapple candy, pear, white peach and golden apple. It finished short and with a bit of bitterness. It was a fairly nice wine for the money, but wasn't anything too memorable.

The second wine that I tried was the 2011 Ravines "Keuka Village," which is 80% Cayuga and 20% Vignoles. Ravines is located on Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes, but I picked this up locally at the Spirited Gourmet for around $13. In the glass the wine was a deep gold color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of honey, green apple, pear, apricot and orange marmalade. On the palate, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with high acidity. It was off-dry with flavors of green apple, lime, honeysuckle flower, orange peel, white grapefruit and pineapple. It was bright, tart and zippy, which surprised me a little because the nose really smelled sweet and I thought this was going to be a syrupy mess. It was nice and citrusy, though, and I could definitely see why someone might want to compare this wine to a kabinett level Riesling. It was nicely aromatic and fairly well balanced, which is a pretty nice combination in a sine under $15.

Know Your Lambrusco - Salamino, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 19:49:00 +0000

Last week, I started a new series called Know Your Malvasia where I take a look at different Malvasia-named grapes and explain where they're grown and how they do or do not relate to other Malvasia grapes. Today I'd like to expand that concept a little and start to talk about the various Lambrusco-named grapes. There is a lot of bad information out there about Lambrusco grapes and over the next few weeks, I'd like to try to set as much of it right as I can, starting with the Salamino grape today.

The two most common bits of misinformation regarding the Lambrusco grapes are pretty much the same as for the Malvasias. Some people will tell you about the Lambrusco "family" of grapes, while others will tell you that the various Lambruscos are made from "sub-types" or "sub-varieties" of a single Lambrusco cultivar. The people that tell you this are wrong. A study done in 2005 (citation 1 below) analyzed most of the Lambrusco-something cultivars grown throughout Emilia-Romagna and while they found first degree (parent/offspring) relationships between a few of the grapes in the study, pretty much none of the major of Lambrusco cultivars were found to be that closely related to one another. Which isn't to say that they aren't related at all. When the team analyzed genetic similarities for all of the grapes in the study, they did find that most of the Lambrusco grapes clustered together, indicating that they probably share a common ancestor at some point along the line, but how distant that relative might be is difficult to say.

As we learned in my last Know Your Malvasia post, there really is no such thing as "sub-varieties" of grapes. But one might wonder, if there isn't any direct familial relationship and if they aren't "sub-varieties," then why do they all have the same word in their name? The word "Lambrusco" means "wild grape" in Italian, and it was long thought that the Lambrusco grapes were domesticated from wild vines around Emilia-Romagna. A study done in 2009 (citation 2 below) analyzed many wild grape varieties in Piemonte and compared their DNA with several Lambrusco varieties as well as several other cultivated grape varieties of the region. They found that the Lambrusco grapes had more DNA in common with the wild grapes than the other cultivated varieties, indicating that they were more closely related to the wild vines and may have been domesticated more recently.

It's worth noting that here in the United States, when we think "wild vines" we think of Vitis labrusca or some of the other "foxy," native American varieties. In Europe, the situation is a little bit different. Wild vines in Europe are still Vitis vinifera, but there is actually a sub-species of the vinifera species called sylvestris. Please note, this is a sub-species, not a "sub-type" or "sub-variety." Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris is differentiated from Vitis vinifera subsp. vinifera mainly by the fact that vinifera flowers are hermaphrodites, meaning that they have both male and female organs and so can pollinate themselves, while sylvestris flowers are dioecious, which means that some flowers are male and produce pollen while others are female and need to receive pollen from males in order to produce fruit (unpollenated flowers just fall off a vine and die, while pollinated flowers produce berries). One can easily understand why hermaphroditism was selected for by early farmers, since the ability to self-pollinate produces a more reliable and a larger crop. Interestingly, there are a handful of Vitis vinifera subsp. vinifera vines that are not self-pollinating, but which are not necessarily dioecious. Lambrusco Sorbara, for example, only has female flowers, so it must receive its pollen from other vines. As a result, Sorbara is often inter-planted with Lambrusco Salamino so that the Salamino pollen can pollinate the Sorbara flowers.

What all this means is that though many of the Lambrusco grapes may be distantly related to one another, they're not exactly a "family." Furthermore, they are all separate grape varieties and are not "sub-types" of any single Lambrusco grape. So how do you know which Lambrusco grape you're drinking? Like Malvasia, it often depends on where you are. Some of the Lambrusco grapes are easy to spot, since their names are typically printed right on the label. Lambrusco di Sorbara is made from the Sorbara grape, while Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetto is made from the Grasparossa grape. Lambrusco Salamino can be found in the Lambrusco Salamino di Santa Croce DOC wines, but can also be found in basic Reggiano DOC wines as well as the wines of Lambrusco Mantovano and the Colli di Scandiano e di Canossa. You can always check the DOC regulations for the region of wine that you're drinking, but if there are many different varieties authorized for use or if your wine is labeled as IGT, then you may just have to live with the mystery.

Lambrusco Salamino is the most common of the Lambrusco varieties and is planted on over 10,000 acres of land (mostly in Emilia-Romagna, though a little bit is surprisingly found in Sardinia). The name "Salamino" comes from the fact that the grape bunches are long and cylindrical and thus thought to resemble little sausages, or "little salamis." There are at least five different clonal variants of Salamino that are recognized by ampleographers: tender, red-leaved, green-leaved, red-stalked, and green-stalked. Salamino grapes are naturally very high in sugar and so they lend themselves to the production of sweet and off-dry wines, though bone-dry wines made from the grape are also widely available. The berries are deeply colored and can provide quite a bit of tannic grip to the finished wine, and Salamino-based Lambruscos are typically heavier-bodied and more aromatic than those from other Lambrusco grapes.

For those who might object that Lambrusco is far too common for me to write about here, I would counter by saying that the first of the three Salamino-based wines that I'll be reviewing is actually a Lambrusco Bianco, which is made from 100% Salamino grapes that were crushed and rapidly moved off the skins before picking up any coloring, as in a Blanc de Noirs Champagne. The wine was the NV Lini 910, which I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for around $16. In the glass the wine was a fairly pale silvery lemon color with nice frothy bubbles. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of toasty bread, apple, green apple candy, toasted nuts and a touch of raspberry. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with high acidity. There were flavors of toasted nuts, toasted bread, ripe apple, pear, fresh cut lemon and lemon peel. The fruits were a bit subdued, but there was a lot of secondary fermentation aromas and characteristics that were quite nice indeed (which is interesting, since this is a tank-fermented wine). I found the wine both interesting and delicious and thought that it was a really great value for the money.

I also had the opportunity to taste Lini 910's regular Lambrusco bottling ($17), which their website says is 85% Salamino and 15% Ancelotta, which is a common Lambrusco blending grape that tends to soften the tannic edges of other grapes and round out the flavor profile a bit. In the glass this wine was a fairly deep purple ruby color with lots of fizz. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of blackberry and black cherry fruit along with grape soda and leather. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. It was dry with flavors of black cherry, blackberry, cola, grape soda and a touch of smoky charcoal. It was very fresh and very fruity, but also dry and very refreshing. This wine is also tank-fermented, and I definitely think it helped to accentuate the fresh fruit flavors. I had this wine with an Italian cold-cut calzone, and it was absolutely perfect, cutting through the oily meats while also standing up to and complementing the tomato sauce I was dipping into.

A few months ago, I wrote about a wine being imported by my friend Matt, who is a co-owner of the Wine Bottega in the North End of Boston, and his new company Selectio Naturel. Matt brings in wines from all over Italy (and some from France too), and he has a handful of really killer Lambruscos in his portfolio. One of them is the 2010 Fondo Bozzole "Giano," which is made from 100% Salamino grapes ($18 at the Bottega). In the glass this wine was a deep, inky ruby-black color with bright purple fizz. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of grape soda, black-berried fruits, dark chocolate, cocoa and char. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. It was dry, but absolutely loaded with blackberry and black cherry fruits and dry grape soda flavors as well. There was a savory edge to the wine as well and I thoroughly enjoyed it with some ground-turkey lasagna. It is versatile enough to pair nicely with a variety of foods, but is also delicious enough to just drink on its own.

CITATIONS

1) Boccacci, P, Marinoni, DT, Gambino, G, Botta, R, & Schneider, A. 2005. Genetic characterization of endangered grape cultivars of Reggio Emilia province. American Journal of Enology and Vititculture, 56(4), ppl. 411-416.

2) Schneider, A, Marinoni, DT, Raimondi, S, Boccacci, P, Gambino, G. 2009. Molecular characterization of wild grape populations from north-western Italy and their genetic relationship with cultivated varieties. Acta Horticulturae, 827, pp. 211-216.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Xinomavro, Krassato & Stavroto, Rapsani, Greece

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:31:00 +0000

Mytikas Peak, the highest point on Mt. Olympus

When I was a kid, I used to love reading about Greek mythology. The Gods and their stories were so interesting to me and I used to love to imagine what it must have been like for them on Mt. Olympus. When I got a little older, I was surprised to learn that there was an actual Mt. Olympus in Greece, as I had always assumed it was just some made up place. It is the highest mountain in Greece and actually has 52 peaks, the highest of which is called Mytikas (pictured at left). Mytikas reaches a height of 9,570 feet, which makes it about 1/3 the size of Mount Everest, whose highest point is nearly 30,000 feet tall. I'm pretty sure they don't grow grapes or make wine around Mt. Everest, but they do around Mt. Olympus, and I'd like to take a look at a wine from this area today.

Mt. Olympus is located on the border between the Greek regions of Thessaly and Macedonia in eastern Greece. Just to the southeast of Mt. Olympus, there's a region called Rapsani which, perhaps unsurprisingly, surrounds a village called Rapsani which was founded in the late 15th Century (possibly from Greeks heading into the mountains to escape the Ottoman invaders). Both the wine-growing region and the village of Rapsani are located in the foothills of Mt. Olympus, but not all of the vineyards are at altitude. There are fertile valley floors from sea level to about 100 meters where the legal harvesting limit of seventy hectolitres per hectare is frequently exceeded. As you might expect, these vineyards tend to produce the least exciting wines. From about 100 meters to 200 meters, the soil type changes to loess, which is a dusty, sandy kind of soil. These vineyards are also fairly high yielding and rarely exciting. At higher elevations, the soil type changes again to a rocky schist and the cooling effect of the altitude starts to have a more noticeable effect on the acidity in the grapes. The highest quality wines are made from these higher vineyard sites.

Rapsani is the only region in Thessaly that is authorized to make red wines. The local regulations state that the red wines of Rapsani must be made from equal parts Xinomavro, Krassato and Stavroto. We've taken a look at Xinomavro before, so interested readers should check out that post for more information on that grape. Most Xinomavro in Greece is grown at more northerly latitudes, and Rapsani is one of the southernmost outposts for Xinomavro in Greece. Stavroto, on the other hand, is typically found a little further south than Rapsani, though still mainly in the region of Thessaly. In The Wines of Greece, Konstantinos Lazarakis describes Stavroto as "difficult to grow," and remarks that "by the time the grapes have reached 11.5 degrees Baumé it is usually half-rotten." It is lower in sugar, acidity and color than either Xinomavro or Krassato, and Lazarakis remarks that "it is doubtful whether Stavroto imparts any meaningful elements to Rapsani." Stavroto is also known as Ampelakiotiko Mavro, or "black from Ambelakia village," which is just southwest of the village of Rapsani, but most authorities, including Miles Lambert-Gócs (in his The Wines of the Greece), believe that Stavroto originated in Euboea, an island off the coast of Thessaly further to the southeast.


Krassato Grapes

Of the three grapes used for Rapsani wines, only Krassato is thought to be native to the region. Lazarakis describes Krassato as "relatively deep in colour...high in sugar and rich in dry extract," though Robinson & Co. temper this description in Wine Grapes by noting that Krassato has only moderate acidity and tannins and thus isn't conducive to extended aging. Which isn't to say that Rapsani wines don't age well. Xinomavro is rich enough in acidity and tannins that it contributes good structure to the finished wines even when it only makes up 1/3 of the final blend. The name Krassato comes from the word krasáto, which means "wine-colored," according to Lambert-Gócs. Like Stavroto, Krassato is mostly found in and around the area of Rapsani, though there are limited plantings just north and south of the region as well. Unlike Xinomavro, Stavroto and Krassato are almost never made into varietal wines, since both grapes have flaws that usually need blending to even out. Further, many of the vineyards of Rapsani have all three vines planted together throughout their vineyards, making varietal wine production especially challenging.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2008 Rapsani Chrisohoou from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for around $17. In the glass the wine was a fairly light purple ruby color (I also have it described as deep lavender in my notes, so pretty much a deep light purple, if that makes any sense). The nose was fairly intense with aromas of wild strawberry, raspberry, tea leaves, and dusty wood. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and light tannins. There were flavors of stewed strawberry, wild raspberry, tart plum, red cherry, black tea and chocolate. It was a soft, smooth wine with lots of zippy red fruits balanced by some earthy tea and chocolate notes. Wines featuring the Xinomavro grape can be lean and austere (particularly in their youth), but the addition of the other two grapes to this blend really rounds out the flavor profile. It's a great food wine that would pair well with lighter meat dishes in fruit sauce. It may not be the wine of the Gods, but it's certainly a wine that I think Bacchus would approve of from his perch on nearby Olympus.

Carricante - Mt. Etna, Sicily, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:30:00 +0000

Given that there are several thousand different grape varieties used for commercial wine production, I'm sure that everybody has a few that they are always getting confused. I know that I personally have a lot of trouble keeping all of the Italian Ver-word grapes straight (Vermentino, Verdicchio, Vernaccia, Verduzzo and probably many more). I also find myself struggling with Vespaiola and Vespolina, Albarola and Albanello, and today's grape, Carricante, and Catarratto. Carricante and Catarratto are especially troublesome for me because both are white grapes that are found almost exclusively on the island of Sicily, though Catarratto is much more common than Carricante (Catarratto covers more than 100,000 acres in Sicily while Carricante manages a scant 250 or so). I'm apparently not the only person with this problem, as Carricante is often erroneously called Catarratto in some parts of Sicily, though the grapes are definitely different cultivars and are not even related. There's not a lot of things to say about Carricante, but I've summarized what I've found below and also have a review of a wine made mostly from Carricante with a little Catarratto thrown in for good measure.

Catarratto tends to be found on the western end of Sicily, in the heart of traditional Marsala country, while Carricante tends to be found around Mt. Etna in the east. Carricante is thought to be native to the area of Viagrande, which is just southeast of Mt. Etna, and early written records indicate that Etna vintners used to barrel-age Carricante wines on their lees so that malolactic fermentation would kick in and soften the wines sharp acidic edge. The name Carricante may be derived from the word carica, which means "load," because the grape is apparently a fairly prolific yielder. If that is the case, then it seems odd that there isn't more Carricante planted, as wines made from the grape are increasingly recognized for their quality. A paper published in 2010 (citation 1 below) found that Carricante's parents were two grapes called Montonico Pinto and Scacco, neither of which are familiar to me. The Etna Bianco DOC requires that wines be made from at least 60% Carricante, though Etna Bianco Superiore requires 80% (and the grapes must come from Milo). Though I've never seen a wine made from Carricante outside of Sicily, the Italian agricultural census of 2000 reported 650 acres of Carricante throughout Italy, though only 250 of them are in Sicily. I do now know where they are hiding the other 400 acres or so and would be interested in hearing from any readers who have come across this grape on the Italian mainland.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2009 Graci "Quota 600" from Mt. Etna in Sicily, which is a blend of 70% Carricante and 30% Catarratto. Carricante is typically blended with other Sicilian grapes, though varietal wines can be found as well. I picked this wine up from my friends at the Wine Bottega for around $35. In the glass the wine was a fairly light lemon gold color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of fresh cut lemon, green apple and river stones. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. There were tart, racy flavors of lemon and lemon peel, green apple, pear and a really intense stony minerality. There wasn't a lot of complexity to this wine, but there was a lot of intensity. It was really heavy on the citrus and stony minerals, and I really enjoyed drinking the wine, but the steep price tag is a little difficult to justify for what you get. My bottling also had a minor cork failure with some seepage around the cork, but I don't think that it threw the wine off in any way.

Cipriani, G. et al. The SSR-based molecular profile of 1005 grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) accessions uncovers new synonymy and parentages, and reveals a large admixture amongst varieties of different geographic origin. 2010. Theoretical and Applied Genetics. 121: 1569-1585.

Rebo - Benaco Bresciano, Lombardy, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 20:21:00 +0000

I frequently receive emails from readers who are looking for more information about a particular grape that they've come across that I haven't had an opportunity to write about yet. A few months ago, several different readers started asking me about an Italian grape called Rebo, which at the time I had not heard of before. One of the people inquiring was just starting to import wine into Ontario, Canada, under the name Don Emilio Brands, and a wine made from the Rebo grape was going to be his first import. It took some creativity, but I was able to get a bottle of Rebo from him, and I'd like to tell you a little more about the grape and the wine made from it.

Rebo was created in 1948 by an Italian agricultural geneticist named Rebo Rigatti at the San Michele all'Adige research center in Trentino. Rigatti lived from 1891 until 1971, which made him a contemporary of Luigi Manzoni, creator of many Italian crossings such as Manzoni Bianco. Manzoni was certainly a more prolific breeder and his crossings are definitely more widespread today than Rigatti's, as evidenced by the fact that Rebo, Rigatti's most well-known crossing, is planted on less than 100 acres in Italy today, as opposed to 24,000 acres for Manzoni Bianco. Many sources (such as Wine Grapes) indicate that Rigatti initially listed Rebo's parentage as Merlot x Marzemino, but that DNA evidence has recently shown that it is in fact a Merlot x Teroldego crossing. Lacombe et al. (citation 1), in their massive study which analyzed several thousand grape varieties to test for synonymies and parental relationships, confirmed that the correct parentage is Merlot x Teroldego, but they list it as confirmation of the breeder's data, which suggests that Rigatti had the parentage recorded correctly all along. I do not have access to Rigatti's papers or published reports so I'm not sure what he actually said, but I don't suppose it matters much since the actual parentage has been confirmed several times at this point.

Most of the Rebo grown in Italy is in the province of Trentino, where Rebo Rigatti lived and worked. Wine Grapes claims that varietal wines from Rebo are grown only in the Trentino DOC, but I think what they mean is that the Trentino DOC is the only DOC or DOCG area in Italy that allows for varietal Rebo wines. Today's wine, the 2009 Pratello "Nero per Sempre," is from the Benaco Bresciano IGT region, which is around the western shore of Lake Garda in Lombardy. Nero per Sempre means something like "black forever" in Italian, but I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to mean in this context. This wine is made from 100% Rebo grapes that are dried in wooden boxes with forced ventilation for 30 days. The partially dried grapes are then pressed and the juice is poured into stainless steel tanks for fermentation. The process is very similar to the production of Amarone, but the drying time for Amarone grapes is much longer. Pratello also makes a regular table wine from non-dried grapes that is 95% Rebo and 5% Barbera, but I wasn't able to try that particular wine.

As mentioned above, the Nero per Sempre was sent to me as a sample bottle (online store here), and I'm not sure what retail on the bottle would be, though the importer told me it might be around $30 in Ontario. As usual, I have not received any compensation for this review other than the bottle itself and what follows is my honest appraisal of the wine. In the glass the wine was a deep, nearly opaque purple-ruby color. The nose was fairly intense with delicious, fruity aromas of black cherry, blackberry jam, cocoa powder and dried cherries. On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity and soft medium tannins. There were flavors of blac cherry, dried tart cherry, blackberry jam, bittersweet chocolate and espresso. The wine clocks in at 15% alcohol and really shows it, as I found it very hot and a little clumsy. It is an absolute whale of a wine, though, with huge, pure fruit flavors. It doesn't have the depth and complexity of fine Amarone, but it also doesn't carry the whopping price tag either and if it's really only around $30, it's a very nice value for those looking for the Amarone experience on a budget. It's such a powerful wine that I have trouble thinking of foods it might complement, and I find myself thinking that it's probably at its best after a meal, maybe with a little bit of cheese.

CITATIONS

1) Lacombe, T., Boursiquot, J.M., Laucou, V., Di Vecchi-Staraz, M., Peros, J.P., & This, P. 2012. Large scale parentage analysis in an extended set of grapevine cultivars (Vitis vinifera L.). Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 126(2), pp 401-414.

Know your Malvasia - Malmsey (Malvasia Branca de São Jorge), Madeira, Portugal

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:30:00 +0000

What are we talking about when we talk about Malvasia? This can be a frustrating question to answer, and many of the sources we would turn to in order to help us understand Malvasia actually aren't much help at all. Most sources, like Oz Clarke's Grapes and Wines and Wikipedia, consider Malvasia as a family of grapes or, even worse, as a series of "sub-varieties" that all basically roll up into a single thing called "Malvasia." Before we go too much farther, I would like to take this opportunity to implore you, if you have ever used the phrase "sub-variety" to describe a grape, to please discontinue this practice and strike these words from your vocabulary. Properly speaking, there really isn't any such thing as a sub-variety. There are grape varieties and there are clonal variants of these varieties, but there is no such thing as a sub-variety. Much of the confusion over sub-varieties comes, I think, from grape "families" like Malvasia, Trebbiano or Lambrusco, where there are a handful of different grapes that all have the same first word in their names, but different second words. The easy conclusion to jump to is that these are all basically the same grape, and they are just different enough to require a second word to differentiate them from one another, but are basically so similar that we are best served by thinking of them as a single group. This is absolutely not the case, and today I'd like to start a new series on this blog called Know Your Malvasia, where I'll be taking a look at different Malvasia-named grapes to see what we're really talking about when we talk about a particular Malvasia. The series will stretch out into Know Your Lambrusco and Know Your Trebbiano as well, so stayed tuned for that.

Malvasia is perhaps the most difficult grape to get a good handle on because while there are definitely named varieties of Malvasia that some wine drinkers are familiar with (such as Malvasia Nera or Malvasia Fina), for the most part, when you come across a wine made from the Malvasia grape, you are only ever given the word "Malvasia" to go on. The most commonly planted Malvasia in Italy is Malvasia Bianca di Candia, which can be found virtually everywhere throughout the country. To make matters worse, though, there are specific varieties of Malvasia that can be found in specific regions of Italy, and these varieties aren't always differentiated from Malvasia Candia. In Tuscany, you've got with Malvasia Bianca Lunga while in Lazio, you're usually dealing with Malvazia del Lazio (for white wines, anyway). Malvazia del Lazio is actually related to the Muscat family of grapes (literally, as it is an offspring of Muscat of Alexandria), but Malvazia Bianca Lunga is more closely related to other Malvasias like Malvasia Nera di Brindisi, Malvasia di Lipari and Malvazija Istarska, though all of these are separate varieties and are in no way "sub-varieties" of any grape. Worst of all, Malvasia Bianca di Candia doesn't seem to be related to any of the other Malvasia varieties, including Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, but rather has a parent-offspring relationship with Garganega, of all things!

Once you get all of the above straightened out, you still have to deal with the rest of the world, since there are a handful of Malvasia-named grapes grapes in Slovenia and Croatia as well as a few in France and Spain as well. Portugal probably comes in second in the race for Malvasia confusion, as they have Malvasia Fina (which we learned is actually the Boal grape from Madeira), Malvasia de Colares, and Malvasia Preta, none of which are related to one another or to the other Malvasia-named wines in other parts of the world. The most well-known Malvasia-named wine in Portugal, though, is actually not generally known as Malvasia at all. Rather it is known as Malmsey, and it is the sweetest of the four noble Madeira styles (which are, from driest to sweetest, Sercial, Boal, Verdelho and Malmsey). Virtually every Madeira source that I've read simply indicates that Malmsey is made from Malvasia grapes, but as I hope we've seen by now, that's really not a very useful distinction. After all, Boal is technically also made from Malvasia grapes, since one of Boal's synonyms is Malvasia Fina. What are we talking about when we talk about Malmsey Madeira?

The answer is, as you might expect, a little complicated. In the 15th Century, Malvasia Cândida (which is not the same as Malvasia Bianca di Canida or Malvasia di Candia Aromatico), which is in fact the same as the Malvasia di Lipari grown in Sicily (which we'll examine in a few weeks), was introduced to the island of Madeira and for many centuries, this was the grape used to produce the wines labeled as Malmsey. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Malvasia Cândida declined in popularity through the years and today there are only about 10 acres of it left on the island of Madeira. In the 1970's, a new grape called Malvasia Branca de São Jorge was introduced to the island. This grape was created by José Leão Ferreira de Almeida at an agricultural research station near Lisbon from two unknown parents and was first cultivated in the parish of São Jorge on the northern coast of Madeira. There are about 86 acres of Malvasia Branca de São Jorge currently planted on Madeira and it is now the dominant grape used for production of wines labeled as Malmsey. So, as a general rule of thumb, wines labeled Malmsey from prior to 1970 or so are probably mostly Malvasia Cândida, while wines made after 1970 are probably Malvasia Branca de São Jorge.

Which brings us to today's wine, which is the NV Rare Wine Company New York Malmsey ($40). I can't say for sure what grape or grapes were used to create this, but my best guess is that it's probably mostly Malvasia Branca de São Jorge. In the glass the wine was a fairly dark tawny-brown color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of burnt sugar, raisins, caramel, prunes and smoke. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. It was very sweet with flavors of smoky scorched sugar, prunes, raisins, toasted nuts and a touch of fresh green apple. The alcohol was pretty noticeable in this wine, much more so than in the other three Madeira styles I tried from this producer (Sercial, Boal, Verdelho), which made the wine a bit more awkward than some of the others. It was a very nice wine, but it was probably my least favorite of this series of wines mostly because I just felt like it wasn't quite as well balanced as some of the others. I'd be curious to try an older vintage version alongside a newer vintage to see what kind of difference the change in grape variety makes.

Vergennes - Finger Lakes, New York, USA

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:25:00 +0000

The recently published Wine Grapes, which I reviewed here, advertises itself as "a complete guide to 1,368 vine varieties," which is really an astonishingly high number of grapes. I've covered just over 200 on this blog and probably have another few hundred in me, but 1,368 represents a staggering amount of work, and even though I definitely have some issues with the book, I really admire and respect Jancis Robinson and her team for all the work that obviously went into the finished product. That being said, one of the first things that I did when I finally got my hands on my copy of the book was go through it to see whether the were any grapes that I had tried that the authors may have overlooked. I didn't find very many, but one that I did find was a grape I discovered when I placed an order with Arbor Hill Winery (who also made the dry Moore's Diamond I wrote about recently) in New York State called Vergennes. I had never heard of Vergennes before seeing it on Arbor Hill's website, so I quickly ordered it and have recently had an opportunity to try it.

Vergennes is thought to have originated as a chance seedling (which just means that a vine was naturally pollinated in the field and one of the resulting seeds was planted) in the garden of a William Green in Vergennes, Vermont in 1874. According to the VIVC database, one of the parents was a grape called Dracut Amber, but since the vine was naturally pollinated, the other parent is currently unknown. Arbor Hill's website claims that the grape has vinifera parentage, but most other sources seem to disagree. In the 1908 work The Grapes of New York (viewable here), U.P. Hedrick considers Vergennes to be a pure Vitis labrusca variety (and the VIVC agrees), and says: "The variety is somewhat remarkable in being probably the best shipper and the best keeper among the pure Labrusca varieties. Nearly all of the grapes which ship and keep well have more or less Vinifera blood, but if Vergennes has any foreign blood it shows it only in its keeping and shipping qualities." Hedrick describes the vine as a reliable cropper that can be prone to excessive yields, which can affect ripening times if left unchecked (excessive crops can delay ripening by up to two weeks). He also says that Vergennes wasn't very popular with growers because the vine had a tendency to sprawl, or grow wild and resist training, which made it difficult to work with in the vineyard. It is fairly cold hardy, but is also somewhat susceptible to diseases like anthracnose.

Hedrick was lukewarm on the quality of the Vergennes grape, saying "the appearance of the fruit is attractive and while the quality is not high, yet it is good; the flavor is agreeable, the flesh is tender and seeds and skin are not objectionable. Considering all of its fruit characters, Vergennes may be said to be more than an ordinary grape - much better than several better known commercial varieties." An account of Vergennes published in 1900 in the Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Eastern New York Horticultural Society is a bit more positive, stating "although the Vergennes is not a new grape, having been introduced in 1870 (sic), it is mentioned here because it is believed to be worthy of more attention from good vineyardists than it has received." The most glowing historical account of grape comes from a gentleman named William Noble, who is quoted in a catalog published in 1894 by Bushberg Vineyards and Grape Nurseries in Jefferson, Missouri (view here). It is interesting to read Noble's effusive praised dampened by the nurserymen in the excerpt below:

"Flavor not rich, but pleasant, free from hard pulp; ripening a little after Concord and possessing superior keeping qualities. As a winter grape it probably heads the list. This variety proves generally satisfactory, in some localities very desirable. General Wm. H. Noble gives the following recommendation to the Vergennes: 'for hardiness, vigor of growth, large bounteous fruitage, a fruit of richest tint of blended pink and purple bloom; for its yield of wine with the most delicate aroma; for its early maturity of wood and fruit; for its long-keeping quality, I think this the equal of any American grape.' While this is excessive praise, which we would not indorse (sic), the Vergennes is no doubt well worthy of attention. It has so far 'held its own,' and increased in popularity."

If you scan through any of these old catalogs or books on American viticulture from the early 20th Century, you'll come across a lot of entries for grapes that have more or less disappeared from cultivation over the past hundred years. Vergennes likely would have joined the ranks of many of those vines if not for John Brahm of Arbor Hill Winery. John graduated from Cornell in 1964 with a degree in Pomology and worked for Widmer Wine Cellars in Naples, New York for over 20 years. He and his wife founded Arbor Hill in 1987 and they decided to plant some "experimental" grape varieties to see how they fared. They are credited with being the first winery to produce a wine made from the Traminette grape, and are also credited with "re-introducing" the Vergennes variety as well.

I bought a bottle of the 2010 Arbor Hill Vergennes for $10.50 from the winery. I spent a little time on Google to see if I could find another Vergennes-based wine and came up blank, so this may very well be the only one in the world right now. Though the skins of the grape are pink, this is a white wine and in the glass it was a fairly light silvery lemon color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of pear, green melon and a subtle but unmistakable note of foxy, musky grapiness. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with high acidity and touch of sweetness. There were flavors of pear and grape musk with something a little steely and minerally on the finish. If you've ever tasted a slip-skin grape like a Scuppernong and kept the skin in your mouth for awhile after you've eaten the pulp, you'd have a really good idea of what this wine tasted like. It had all the musk and flavor of a wild grape, but it lacked the sugary kick that you expect to go along with those flavors and aromas. Much like the dry Moore's Diamond from this same producer, I found this wine a bit disconcerting, odd and not really all that pleasant to drink. While I applaud the spirit of experimentation that would lead one to make dry or mostly dry wines from native American grape varieties, I'm beginning to feel like the results are showing why so many producers make sweet wines from these grapes. Some flavors just need some sugar, and these wild, musky grape flavors certainly fall into that category for me.

Terrano - Carso, Friuli, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:28:00 +0000

In the very early days of this blog, I went through a few of the wine books that I had and tried to put together a grape "wish list." The first list had about two dozen grapes on it and I sent it around to a few of the wines shops that I frequented to see if they had any of them in stock or to see if they could possibly order some of them for me. The Terrano grape was on that list, and I'm happy to say that not only were my wine shop friends able to help me track that particular grape down, but also every other grape that I could come up with at that time. I don't really keep a list any more these days (though I do have a kind of unofficial list in my head of things that I'm always on the lookout for) but I do still hang on to that first one so I can see just how much ground we've covered here in only a few years time.

Which brings us to today's grape, Terrano. Terrano has been around for a very long time, with the first mention of it actually coming all the way back in 1340 AD. These old references mention both a white and a red-berried Terrano, but the white-berried form seems to have been lost to history. The very earliest mentions of Terrano in print are to plantings in modern day Slovenia, where it is currently known as Refošk. Slovenia is the world leader for plantings of Terrano with a couple thousand hectares under vine around the city of Trieste, which is actually in the region of Friuli in Italy, but it's in that weird little finger of Italy in the extreme northeast that is practically surrounded by the nation of Slovenia (see map). Most Slovenian plantings are just north and south of the city of Trieste, and many of the Italian plantings can be found around Trieste as well (there were only about 200 hectares of Terrano in Italy as of 2000). If you go south from Trieste and through the narrow band of Slovenia into the Istrian peninsula of Croatia, you will find more plantings of Terrano, as Croatia has nearly 500 hectares of Terrano (known here as Teran) under vine.

There is a particular kind of soil called Terra Rossa, or "red earth," in this little corner of the world and it is said that Terrano reaches its greatest heights only when grown on this terra rossa soil. When dirt turns red, it is usually because of high iron content, and according to Wikipedia, wines made from Terrano are unusually high in iron. Wikipedia's source is a link to this page, which says that Terrano's unique flavor is actually due to the iron (bivalent iron, whatever that means) reacting to lactic acid in the finished wine, and, further, that wines made from Terrano tend to deteriorate quickly because the iron levels drop rapidly within a year or two of fermentation and this special chemical bond dissipates. There are no sources cited and I haven't found any evidence elsewhere to support these claims, so caveat emptor etc (though if commenter WineKnurd is reading, I'd be very interested to hear his take in the comments below).

Terrano belongs to something called the Refoschi Family, whose name is a bit misleading since many of the grapes in this family aren't actually related to one another. Like the word Trebbiano or Malvasia, over the years the word Refosco has been used to describe a number of different grape varieties grown in and around this little area where Italy, Slovenia and Croatia meet. The most common Refosco grape is Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso, which we covered here some time ago. There is also Refosco di Faedis, Refosco d'Istria (which is the same as Terrano), Refosco di Guarnieri, Refosco del Botton (which is the same as Tazzalenghe) and Refosco Gentile. Of these grapes, only Refosco del Botton, Refosco Gentile and Refosco di Faedis seem to have any genetic relationship to one another (the former two seem to have a parent-offspring relationship with the third). While the others do share many ampelographic traits, to the extent that Terrano and Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso were long thought to be the same variety, the DNA evidence seems to show that they are actually distinct varieties*. Interestingly, the grape known as Cagnina in Emilia-Romagna (where it is made into sweet red wines) is the same grape as Terrano, and this is one of the very few places outside of Friuli/Slovenia/Croatia where this grape can be found.

I was able to try two different wines made from the Terrano grape. The first was the 2009 Tenuta Amalia "Mamertino," which I picked up from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for around $12. I don't know very much about this wine since the bottle just says "Product of Italy" and "Italian Frizzante Red Wine." The importer's website says it is 100% Terrano, but I have no idea where the grapes are from. The back labeling almost seemed to be saying that the grapes come from Italy, but the wine itself may be made, or at least bottled, here in the US. In any case, the wine was a medium purple ruby color in the glass. The nose was reserved with aromas of black cherry, blackberry and grape soda. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity. It was also sweet with just a touch of fizziness to it. There were flavors of grape Kool-aid, black cherry and grape soda. The finish was astoundingly short and really tasted more like soda or juice than wine. I don't really know what this is or what it's supposed to be, but I don't think I'm a fan of it.

I figured there had to be more to Terrano than this, so when I found a bottle of the 2011 Catelvecchio Terrano from the Carso region of Friuli, I snapped it up ($20 from Vintages in Concord, MA). As I mentioned above, I had read that Terrano-based wines are really not meant for ageing, so I figured I'd give a newer vintage a shot. In the glass the wine was an inky purple black color with a bright purple rim. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of smoke, sour cherry, cranberry, wet leather, blackberry and black cherry. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with very high acidity and medium tannins. It was sour with flavors of tart cherry, cranberry, under-ripe blackberry and leather. It was bright and zippy, but also almost painfully sour to drink and really demanded some high acid, tomato-saucy kind of food. It was miles better than the Mamertino, but still wasn't something that I think I'll find myself reaching for very often.

*This is according to Jose Vouillamoz's private research reported in Wine Grapes, which you can read all about here to decide how big a grain of salt is required.

Biancu Gentile - Corsica, France

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:26:00 +0000

I've covered some pretty rare grapes on this site over the past three years or so, but today's grape is definitely the scarcest one that I've ever written about. I would guess that prior to today, my post on Amigne probably would have taken the prize for rarest grape, as it is planted on less than 50 hectares of land in the world, and nearly all of them are in a single valley in Switzerland. It's possible that something like Tempranillo Blanco may be planted on less land, but I haven't been able to find any planting statistics that would say for sure. Today's grape, though, is grown on a scant 6 hectares of land, which only comes to around 15 acres. To put it another way, 15 acres is 0.023 square miles (0.060 square km for those of you on the metric system). When I was growing up in Georgia (the US state, not the country), my family lived just outside of a very small town on about 13 acres of land. You could stand anywhere in the yard and see every other part of it with little trouble and if you wanted to run a lap around it, it would probably take you about 10 minutes at a good jog. Six hectares is practically nothing.

But it's not absolutely nothing, and the wine made from the grapes grown on those scant six acres of land does occasionally find its way to our shores. Before we get to the wine, though, I'd like to take a few moments to take a closer look at the Biancu Gentile grape itself. References to Biancu Gentile can be traced back to 1822, when the grape was said to be growing in Pila Canale in the southern part of the island of Corsica. It is thought to be native to Corsica and examples of Biancu Gentile have not been discovered anywhere outside of the island (though UC Davis does have a small experimental plot growing in the San Joaquin Valley in California). The grape's name means something like "noble white," but the word gentile can also mean something like "grafted," or, "cultivated," as opposed to "wild." Biancu Gentile is prized for its aromatic profile and can reach very high sugar levels, but the acidity begins to drop precipitously as the sugars rise so growers must be especially vigilant in order to pick grapes that can make balanced rather than heavy, flabby wines.

The grape was thought to be extinct when Yves Leccia, whose varietal Biancu Gentile we'll be taking a look at below, discovered a small block of it growing somewhere on the island of Corsica. He took some cuttings and began to cultivate it in his own vineyards. Since Biancu Gentile was supposed to be extinct, it was not permitted in the AOC wines of Corsica and so anyone making a varietal wine from it had to resort to the vin de table classification level for their wines. As of 2010, Biancu Gentile is allowed in the new IGP classification (which is basically the new EU-wide term for what used to be called vin de pays in France or IGT in Italy), so wines made from it can have the grape name listed on the bottle (this is forbidden at the vin de table level, as is vintage information or specific geographic information). Biancu Gentile is often blended with the local variety of Vermentino, but a handful of producers such as Yves Lecchia, Antoine Arena and Yves Canarelli of Clos Canarelli make varietal wines from their scant plantings (around 1 ha each) of the grape.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2011 Yves Leccia Biancu Gentile as a special order from my friends at the Wine Bottega for around $40. All of Yves Leccia's white wines are pressed and cold soaked for 24 hours before allowing fermentation to begin. Fermentation (2-3 weeks) and maturation (6 months) is done in temperature controlled stainless steel and there is no malolactic fermentation. In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of ripe pear, lime, grapefruit, honeysuckle flower, lemon peel and chalk. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium to medium + acidity. There were flavors of lime, grapefruit, pear, and honeysuckle with a bit of chalky minerality on the finish. The nose was an absolutely delightful citrus fruit cocktail, but the intensity and just general loveliness didn't really follow through that much on the palate. The price tag on this wine is pretty steep for what you're getting, but then again, with only 6 hectares under cultivation, you may not get many chances to try a Biancu Gentile based wine.

Domina - Franken, Germany (or, what the heck is a Bocksbeutel?)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:31:00 +0000

Today's grape is a German crossing just like so many other German crossings that I've written about time and time again (see, for example, my posts on Huxelrebe, Dornfelder, Scheurebe and Kerner). The grape's name is Domina (which means "lady") and it was created in 1927 at the German research institute of Geilwilerhof by two men named Bernhard Husfeld and Peter Morio. They crossed Pinot Noir and Blauer Portuguesier to create a high-yielding grape with very good disease resistance. The vine is so productive that bunch-thinning is required to avoid thin, dilute wines from over cropping. The berries are fairly small, and as a result, the finished wines tend to be very deeply colored, which is interesting since neither Pinot Noir nor Blauer Portuguesier are particularly well known for producing deeply colored wines. The grape is grown on about 400 hectares of land in Germany (just under 1000 acres), most of which (350 hectares) is in Franken (just east of Frankfurt in southeastern Germany) and the Ahr (just west of Bonn). There are apparently also about 1000 square yards under wine in Switzerland, but I'm not aware of any other plantings in any other countries.

An unbelievable number of grapes grown commercially in Germany are, like Domina, crossings made at these research institutions, and if you're curious as to why that may be the case, I invite you to peruse any of the articles linked above, as I feel like I've discussed it ad nauseum. Instead, I'd like to talk a little bit about the bottle that this wine was sold in, the bocksbeutel. Wikipedia calls the shape of the bocksbeutel a "flattened ellipsoid," but it really just kind of looks like a flask to me. I've seen and tried many German wines in this particular kind of bottle, but I always assumed it was some kind of gimmicky packaging used to catch the eye of a consumer. I didn't realize that the EU considers it a "protected bottle shape," which is something I didn't even know existed, but apparently that means that the actual shape of the bottle itself must conform to certain measurements, and also that only certain wines from certain areas are allowed to use it. According to Wikipedia, the bottle specifications state that a bocksbeutel must be "a short-necked glass bottle, pot-bellied but flattened in shape, with the base and the cross-section of the bottle at the point of greatest convexity ellipsoidal in shape. The ratio between the long and short axes of the ellipsoidal cross-section is approximately 2:1, and the ratio of the height of the convex body to the cylindrical neck of the bottle is approximately 2.5:1."

They go on to note that the bocksbeutel is approved for use in the following areas:

- German wines of QbA and Prädikatswein quality from Franconia and Certain parts of Baden, in the district known as Tauberfranken and around Baden-Baden

- Certain wines from Northern and Central Italy at the DOC and DOCG level:

-Santa Maddalena (St. Magdalener),

-Valle Isarco (Eisacktaler), if made from Silvaner or

Müller-Thurgau

-Terlaner, if made from Pinot Blanc

-Bozner Leiten

-Alto Adige (Südtiroler), if made from Riesling, Müller-Thurgau, Pinot noir, Moscato Giallo, Silvaner,

Lagrein, Pinot Blanc or Moscato Rosa

-Greco di Bianco

-Trentino, if made from Moscato

-(in ancient times) Montepulciano

- Certain Greek wines

-Agioritiko

-Rombola Kephalonias

-Wines from the island of Kefalonia

-Wines from the island of Paros

-Wines from the Peloponnese

- Certain Portuguese wines. The use is limited to rosé wines and those other quality wines and vinho regional which can prove that they have traditionally been bottled in cantil-type bottles before they received their present classification.

The bottle's history can be traced back several hundred years. In his The Wines of Germany, Stephen Brook notes that the bocksbeutel shape appears in some German artwork of the 16th Century and that glass versions have been manufactured in Germany since at least 1685. In 1726, the Prince-Bishop of Würzberg declared that the best wines from that city be bottled in the bocksbeutel, and its wider use followed shortly after. There is no agreement on the origin of the name, but there are at least two major theories. The first is that it comes from the word Booksbüdel, which was the name for a small sack used to carry books, like prayer books or song books, in the 15th and 16th Centuries. The other explanation is that name means "ram's scrotum," because the shape of the bottle apparently resembles the scrotum of a ram. I do a lot of fact checking for this blog, but that's something I'm just going to take someone else's word on.

The wine that I was able to try was the 2009 Winzer Sommerach Domina from the Franken region of Germany, which I picked up from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for around $25 (I believe it is also currently available from the fine folks at Curtis Liquors for around the same price). In the glass the wine was a fairly dark purple-ruby color. The nose was somewhat reserved with aromas of black cherry, blackberry, old leather, cedar and char. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and low, soft tannins. There were flavors of smoky, scorched black cherry and sour cherry, blackberry, cedar and cranberry. There was an intriguing mixture of dark black fruits and tart red fruits, but the palate was mostly dominated by a kind of bitter smokiness. It wasn't as pronounced (or as unpalatable) as the burnt rubber that pretty much ruined the Blauer Portuguesier that I tried, but it still was a bit unwelcome for me. It was a nice wine, but probably a bit over priced for what you get. I've taken some heat for not being a big fan of German red wines, and this bottle clearly isn't the one to show me the light.

Žlahtina - Krk, Croatia

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:26:00 +0000

Several years ago, when I first started writing this blog, I came across the website for the Blue Danube Wine company, which is an importer located in California that specializes in eastern European wines. I looked through their online catalog and found an incredible number of wines made from grapes that I had never heard of before and which I had little chance of finding in my local wine shops. I live in the state of Massachusetts, though, and it isn't legal for wineries, wine shops, distributors or importers to sell wine directly to me, so for the past couple of years, I've just had to admire Blue Danube's portfolio from afar and hope that I could someday try some of the interesting wines that they were working with. A few months ago, my dream came true as Blue Danube began to be distributed within Massachusetts by Arborway Imports. Arborway only carries a handful of Blue Danube's wines, but most importantly, they and Frank Dietrich (owner of Blue Danube) were willing to work with me and allow me to get my hands on several of Blue Danube's offerings in a totally legal fashion. Over the next few weeks and months, I'll be writing about many of these really cool wines that I've been able to try.

The first wine I'd like to tell you about is made from the Žlahtina grape. Žlahtina is a Croatian grape that is found on the island of Krk just off the coast of Dalmatia in northwestern Croatia (see this map for more details). Krk is the largest of the more than 1000 islands in Croatia and most of the vineyards on the island are located inland, away from the coast, in order to avoid the "Bura," the strong wind that blows throughout the region of Dalmatia. Krk was once well known for the wines it produced and at one time, the island was covered with over 25,000 hectares (nearly 62,000 acres) of vines. Today, however, there are fewer than 250 hectares left, over 95% of which are devoted to the Žlahtina grape. The grape's name comes from the the Croatian word "Žlahtno," which means noble and gives some indication as to how highly regarded the grape was in the past. Most sources agree that Žlahtina is likely native to the island of Krk, as it is found pretty much nowhere else in the country (or outside the country, for that matter).

There are some naming issues with Žlahtina that can cause confusion with other grape varieties. There is a grape grown in Slovenia called Rdeča Žlahtnina, or "pink Žlahtnina," and according to the crew at Wine Grapes, the genetic profile given for Rdeča Žlahtnina in a recent paper (citation 1) matches that of the Chasselas grape from Switzerland. I checked the profile for Chasselas in the VIVC database, and it looks like they do match. The Wine Grapes crew also say that Žlahtina is an accepted synonym for Chasselas in the VIVC database (and therefore that many believe that Žlahtina and Chasselas are actually the same grape), but it looks like they weren't reading carefully enough. There is a Žlahtina Bigela, a Žlahtnina, and a Žlatina listed as synonyms for Chasselas, but no Žlahtina. Furthermore, the DNA profile given for Žlahtina in this 1999 paper is definitely distinct from that of Chasselas/Rdeča Žlahtnina, showing that this is definitely a distinct grape variety.

While I did order several wines from Blue Danube, Frank was kind enough to also send me a few samples and the bottle under review here was one of those sample bottles. It is the 2011 Šipun Estate Žlahtina, which retails for about $17 on the Blue Danube website. The vineyards and winery are located on the eastern part of the island of Krk, around the city of Vrbnik. The wine is fermented in stainless steel and then 60% is kept in tank while 40% is aged in a mixture of acacia, oak, mulberry and chestnut woods. In the glass the wine was a fairly light silvery lemon color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of pear, white flowers, green melon, golden apple and chalk. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of Lemon, pear, white flowers, pineapple and green apple with a strong, stony and chalky kind of minerality on the finish. It was tart and racy, but also delicate and soft at the same time. It was dominated by lemon citrus and mineral flavors, but it had a little flesh with some white pear fruit as well. Ivica Dobincic, a Croatian vigneron, praises the Žlahtina grape for its difficulty in accumulating sugars, even in very hot years, which means that these wines are often modest in alcohol (this one was 12.4%) and delicately flavored. It's a light, delicious little wine that was really a pleasure to drink.

CITATION

Štajner, N, et al. 2008. Microsatellite genotyping of old Slovenian grapevine varieties (Vitis vinifera L.) of the Primorje (coastal) winegrowing region. Vitis, 47(4), pp 201-4.

Odds and Ends - Turina Wines Edition (Marzemino, Friulano, Schioppetino and sparkling Groppello/Marzemino)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:30:00 +0000

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Odds and Ends, where I write about interesting wines that I've tried lately which I don't think merit a full post on their own. All of the wines I'll be writing about today are made from grapes that I've already written extensively about in the past and those relevant links will be included in each write-up. Additionally, all of the wines I'll be looking at today are imported by my good friend Paul Turina, whose new and improved company website can be perused here. I profiled Paul and his company about a year ago (read here) and have since tried a handful of wines from various producers that he imports. All of the wines I'll be writing about below were provided to me as samples by Paul, but all opinions expressed are entirely my own and I have received no compensation for any of the reviews below other than the wines themselves.

About a month after I first met Paul, I was introducing him to some people in the Boston area to try and get his wines distributed here (he is still looking for a Massachusetts distributor, so if anyone is interested, please email him). One of the wines he poured at a meeting that I accompanied him to was this sparkling pink wine made by some distant relatives of his around Lake Garda in Italy. I wasn't able to get a note written on the wine (unlike the sparkling Turbiana he also brought which I wrote about here), but I remember enjoying it quite a bit. I asked him a few weeks ago if he still had any around and he said he had a few bottles from a recent shipment. He handed the bottle off to me the next time he was in town and I promptly popped the cork on it. It's a non-vintage, tank-fermented sparkling wine that is made from about 50% Groppello and 50% Marzemino and retail on the bottle (from Paul's website) is about $17. In the glass the wine was a medium salmon pink color with fine steady bubbles. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of fresh cut strawberry, red cherry, watermelon and pink bubblegum. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity. It was dry and tasted like cut watermelon and strawberries with a touch of red cherry. It finished with a clean, almost quinine-like bitterness. It's a fun wine, but it's well structured enough to be serious as well. I drank it around Valentine's Day and it's the perfect wine for that occasion.

His distant Italian relatives not only make wines from Groppello and Turbiana, but also from the Marzemino grape, which I wrote about around a year and a half ago. Paul recently let me try his family's 2009 Marzemino from the Brescia region of Lombardy on the western shore of Lake Garda. In the glass the wine was a medium purple ruby color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of sour cherry, blackberry, cocoa powder and leather. On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with high acid and fairly soft tannins. There were flavors of tart cherry, blackberry, old dusty leather, black plum and cocoa powder. It was a little lean, but it made up for it with a nice, bright, racy streak of acidity. As I said in my previous post, Marzemino seems like a grape tailor-made for tomato sauces and pizza. I had this wine with a big plate of spaghetti and it was a near perfect match. While I'm not as fond of Marzemino in general as Don Giovanni was, I do like it in the right circumstances and this is a very well made example.

Paul imports wine from a number of different regions in Italy and from a number of different producers. I've taken a look at some of his producers making wines from Vespaiola, Grechetto and Sagrantino in the past, but today I'd like to take a look at a couple of wines from a producer he works with in Friuli called Petrussa. Petrussa is located in the Colli Orientali del Friuli region of northeastern Italy and they deal with many of the grapes that are common to that region. One of them is Friulano, which we took a look at about a year ago. This particular bottling is from the 2009 vintage. In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color. The nose was fairly reserved with aromas of white pear, lilac and eucalyptus. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly low acidity and a kind of oily mouthfeel. There were flavors of eucalyptus, pear and lime with a kind of stewed vegetable quality that I find in many of the wines made from the Friulano grape. This is a well-made wine, but it's a grape that I just can't fall in love with.

The next wine from Petrussa that I tried was made from the Schioppettino grape, which I did like quite a bit when I was able to try it before. This particular wine was from the 2008 vintage and in the glass it was a medium purple ruby color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of black cherry, plum, fresh turned earth, damp leaves and leather. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with high acidity and soft tannins. There were flavors of tart cherry, blackberry, old leather and wet leaves. Right after the cork was pulled, the wine was searingly, almost abrasively sour but it does round out a bit as it settles into the glass. It's bright and zippy the whole time, though, so fans of high-acid red wines probably need not apply here. The bright, tart fruits are really well balanced by the damp earthy flavors and the wine reminds me a bit of an electrified Pinot Noir. It needs food and it needs high acid food so anything with tomato sauce would go quite nicely here.

Sciacarello (Mammolo) - Ajaccio, Corsica, France

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:29:00 +0000

One of my favorite kinds of Fringe Wines are those made from grapes that are somewhat common in certain blended wines, but which are rarely found playing the star role. As I mentioned in my post on Susumaniello, blending grapes usually get their reputation by having one or two very nice qualities, but by also being somewhat deficient in several other areas. A grape may have a nice aroma and good color, but may be low in acid or excessively high in tannins so if you can find another grape with good acid and a soft body but which lacks perfume and is lightly colored, the two of them together can create a well-balanced wine. Though I generally focus on varietal wines for this blog, that's mostly a decision made on the nature of the content that I write about and not a personal preference. I enjoy varietal wines, but some of my favorite wines in the world are blends, and I try to represent that section of the wine world, when I can, in my erratic Weird Blend Wednesday feature. Since the focus of this site has really shifted more to individual grape varieties, though, it stands to reason that the majority of my posts deal with varietal wines.

All of which kind of takes me away from what I really wanted to talk about today, which was varietal wines made from traditional blending grapes. Sometimes blending grapes really are useful only for the handful of attributes that they can contribute to a blend, but sometimes they just need a little change of scenery in order to show their true colors. Carmenere, for instance, was a very minor component in Bordeaux blends for many years, but when the grape was exported to Chile and growers figured out how to work with it there, it became a star grape in its new home. Malbec has a similar story, though it was a star player in a little area called Cahors before hitting it big in Argentina. Even Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, the two king red grapes of the New World, were originally blending components of the great wines of Bordeaux, though they certainly played a more prominent role in those wines than Carmenere or Malbec ever did.

Which brings us to today's grape, which is one that a lot of people may have had at some point or another, but very few have had in a starring role. It is known in Tuscany as Mammolo and it was once a crucial part of the Chianti blend. It has been known in Tuscany since the early 17th Century under a variety of names, all of which relate in some form or another to the many different morphological characteristics of the many clones that are out there. There's Mammolo Piccolo, Mammolo Grosso, Mammolo Asciuto and Mammolo Tonda, among many others. The Mammolo part of the name is thought to come from the Italian name for violets, Viola mammola, because of the perfumed quality that the grapes can impart to a finished wine. It was once widely planted throughout Tuscany, but its numbers have been on the decline and as of the 2000 agricultural census, there were less than 150 hectares (360 acres) under vine in all of Italy.

Off the western coast of Italy is the island of Corsica which technically belongs to France, but which is closer geographically and culturally to Italy. We paid a brief visit to Corsica a few months back to take a look at a blended wine made mostly from a grape they call Nieullccio, but which happens to be none other than Sangiovese. That particular wine also had a dollop of something called Sciacarello in it, which recent DNA testing (citation 1) has shown to be none other than the Mammolo of Tuscany (there is another Corsican grape called Malvasia Montanaccio which is also identical to Sciacarello and Mammolo, but that name is far less common than the others). Like Sangiovese, it is thought that Sciacarello was brought to Corsica from the Italian mainland, and the fact that it has parent-offspring relationships with several other Tuscan grapes (none of which are widely known today) seems to back this theory up. The name Sciacarello means "crunchy," but I'm not really sure how that adjective fits in with the grape itself. Sciacarello is currently grown on just under 800 hectares of land (just under 2,000 acres) throughout the island of Corsica, though much of it, including both wines I'll be taking a look at today, is around the area of Ajaccio on the western part of the island.

I was able to find two Corsican wines from the same producer, but in two very different styles. The first was the 2011 rosé from the Domaine Comte Abbatucci, which is 100% Sciacarellu (the local spelling of the grape's name), and which I picked up for around $30 from my friends at the Wine Bottega. In the glass the wine was a very pale salmon-pink color. The nose was fairly intense and very leesy with aromas of cheese and strawberry and little else. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. The pronounced leesy, cheesy character followed through on the palate and was joined by some tart strawberry and cherry fruits with a bit of a stony mineral finish. The fruits were strangled at room temperature, but as the wine approached cellar temp, they began to open up a little bit and the strong aroma and flavor of cheese began to fade into the background. It's a well structured, but somewhat austere wine that I had a hard time falling in love with. At $30 a bottle, it's probably not something I'll be reaching for on a regular basis.

The other wine that I was able to try was the 2010 Domaine Comte Abbatucci red wine, which is 70% Sciacarellu and 30% Nieulluccio, and which I picked up for around $37 from Marty's in Newton. In the glass the wine was a fairly light purple ruby color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of wild, brambly red fruit like red cherry and raspberry along with some dried leaves, underbrush and leather. I thought I may have picked up a hint of violet, but it could have been my imagination running away with me. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of red cherry, raspberry, sour plum, dusty leather, cigar tobacco and damp tea leaves. The wine reminded me more of Pinot Noir than Chianti and while I found it enjoyable enough, I thought that the nearly $40 price tag was a bit too steep for what you get here. If this wine's price were slashed in half, then I think you might be a bit closer, but it's always very difficult to assign an exact price to a wine's experience. If money is no object, then this is a very lovely bottle from a grape that is becoming increasingly harder to find in a starring role.

CITATION

Di Vecchi Staraz, M, et al. 2007. Genetic structuring and parentage analysis for evolutionary studies in grapevine: kingroup and origin of cv. Sangiovese revealed. Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science, 132(4), pp. 514-24.

Ortrugo - Colli Piacentini, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:07:00 +0000

"It's hot, drink Ortrugo." These were the words, tweeted by my friend Matt at the Wine Bottega (way back in the summer, naturally), that introduced me to the Ortrugo grape. I had never heard of it before, but after some quick Googling, I could tell that this was something I'd be interested in. I asked Matt whether they had any Ortrugo in stock and he said that they did, but the wine was only about 35% Ortrugo. I like to try and write about varietal wines whenever possible and if that isn't possible, I try to aim for at least 75% of a blend, but sometimes I have to take what I can get. I bought the wine and held out hope that I'd be able to find a varietal Ortrugo at some point in the future, but to date my efforts have been in vain. I decided it's time to go ahead and write the post so today I'd like to tell you a little bit about Ortrugo and the wine that I was able to try.

Like an unbelievable number of grapes (see Abouriou, Malagousia, Timorasso, Pugnitello, Roscetto, Pecorino and Casetta, among many others), Ortrugo was on the brink of extinction until it was rediscovered and rescued in the 1970's. It was first mentioned in print (under synonyms Artrugo and Altrugo) in 1881 and the first mention of it as Ortrugo appeared in 1927. It is thought that the name comes from altra uva, which means "the other grape" in the local dialect, though it's not entirely clear what the other grape that it is being contrasted with might be. It could have been Trebbiano Romagnolo, the Trebbiano variety native to Emilia-Romagna that covers a lot of ground throughout that region, or it could be Malvasia di Candia Aromatica which was the grape that was perhaps most responsible for Ortrugo's decline. Throughout the early and middle parts of the 20th Century, many growers replaced their Ortrugo vines with Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, though I'm not really sure why since Ortrugo is a high yielding vine that is fairly easy to grow, though it is somewhat susceptible to the European grapevine moth.

The grape had all but disappeared when Luigi Mossi discovered a small patch of Ortrugo growing in a decrepit corner of one of his vineyards near the city of Piacenza in the Val Tidone. Rather than just pull up the vines, Luigi decided to harvest them and make a small bit of wine from them. He tasted the resulting wine with some of his friends and decided to plant an entire vineyard over to the grape. People thought he was crazy to plant so much land to a grape that no one had really heard of, but pretty soon his wines made from Ortrugo were outselling his Malvasia based wines. Other growers took notice and began to plant Ortrugo vines of their own. Today there are about 500 hectares (1,300 acres) of Ortrugo planted in Italy and nearly all of them are in and around the Colli Piacentini DOC in the western part of Emilia-Romagna, which used to be a part of Piedmont and is just southeast of Oltrepò Pavese in Lombardy. Varietal wines from Ortrugo are allowed here and some producers do make them, but it is also frequently blended with Malvasia and Trebbiano Romagnolo. Ortrugo lends itself well to sparkling wine production and wines made from it can be found in fully sparkling, frizzante and still forms.

The wine that I was able to find was the 2010 La Tosa "Rio del Tordo," which is a still wine made from 35% Ortrugo, 35% Malvasia, 20% Trebbiano & 10% Sauvignon Blanc. In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color. The nose was moderately intense with aromas of grapefruit, peach and a touch of grassy herbaceousness. On the palate the wine was light bodied with fairly high acidity. There were flavors of lemon, grapefruit, green apple, apricot, and citrus peel. It was tart, bright and refreshing and I was surprised at how much the wine reminded me of varietal Sauvignon Blanc given that that grape only made up 10% of the final blend. It had a lot of Sauvignon Blanc character with a bit of peachy stone fruit and white flowers thrown in for good measure. It's a very nice wine that is definitely great on a hot summer day, which is fortunately the situation that I was able to try it it in rather than the blizzard conditions we've been experiencing here in the northeast lately. I hope to find a varietal Ortrugo some day, but in the meantime, this is the best that I've been able to do.

Cococciola - Terre de Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:46:00 +0000

Cococciola is the kind of grape that makes me hate writing. That sounds a little harsh, I know, but I remember being so excited when I came across it in a local Italian wine shop since it was something completely new and different to me, which is no small feat these days. I naturally bought the wine and opened it almost right away. I enjoyed it quite a bit and immediately starting trying to find more information on it for a post here. After I drank it, I started to see a few email offers for wines made from the Cococciola grape and saw a few pieces online about it, but when I tried to really dig in and find enough good information to fill out an entire blog post, I just wasn't getting anywhere. There is virtually no mention of Cococciola in any of the academic databases I usually use and the few references in books and online that I have been able to track down rarely have more than a sentence or two of vague, generic boilerplate information that hardly seems like it is worth reporting. I keep looking for a story with Cococciola and I think that the best story that I've been able to find is that there really isn't much of a story to Cococciola at all. So I finally decided to just give up on researching this grape and will just present the little bit of information that I was able to find and get to the tasting note as quickly as possible.

I started, as I usually do, with the Oxford Companion to Wine, whose entry on the grape reads in full "white wine variety native to the Abruzzo where it is blended with Trebbiano." Lettie Teague at the Wall Street Journal wrote about Cococciola back in 2010, but her entire blog post only runs to two paragraphs, only one sentence of which actually contains any informational content ("Cococciola is a grape grown in the Abruzzi region of Italy (in the province of Terre di Chieti) where it produces a pleasingly crisp, slightly grassy white that’s a wonderful aperitif and a perfect summer drink"). There's a handful of brief blog posts more or less in that vein scattered across the internet that you can Google at your leisure, but pretty much none of them go any deeper than the two quotes above.

The most in-depth treatment of Cococciola comes from Wine Grapes, but even their coverage is pretty sparse. The "Origins and Parentage" section is a single sentence, which reads in full "The origins of this variety and of its strange name are unclear and its earliest mention seems to be in Viala and Vermorel's Ampélographie (1901-1910) under the synonym Cacciola." Though I've been able to track down a few volumes of the Ampélographie online, I haven't found the volume (there are 7 in total) that mentions Cacciola and since I don't have thousands of dollars to spend on a copy for myself, I can't report what that book has to say about the grape. Wine Grapes goes on to say that Cococciola is mostly planted in Abruzzo and northern Puglia where it was traditionally used as a very minor blending component with Trebbiano d'Abruzzo (thanks largely to its high yields), though it is being used more these days to make varietal wines. As of 2000, there were shockingly 893 hectares (2,207 acres) under vine in Italy, which is much higher than I would have expected.

The wine that I was able to find was the 2010 Cantina Frentana Cococciola from the Terre di Chieti area of Abruzzo, which i picked up for around $19 from Panzano Proviste. In the glass the wine was a pale silvery lemon color. The nose was moderately intense with subtle aromas of lemon, apricot, green apple and white flowers. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity. There were tart, racy flavors of lemon and green apple with a touch of apricot and pear and a lovely stony mineral finish. I found the wine bright and sharp with really lively acidity, but there were also nice round stone fruit flavors that kept this from being too austere. I thoroughly enjoyed drinking it and am glad that I gave it a shot, even if it has been unpleasant to try and post about. I guess it just goes to show that a grape doesn't have to be interesting in order for the wine to be good. This is definitely a grape to try if you happen to run across it in your local shop.

Huxelrebe - Rheinhessen, Germany

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 21:20:00 +0000

I love German wines. To be truthful, I love wines from pretty much anywhere, but I have a particular soft spot in my heart for the wines of Germany. Riesling is my absolute favorite grape and I don't believe that any other country or region can match the range and depth of Rieslings from Germany. Unfortunately, it seems that in the United States, the Riesling grape has become so entwined with the image of German wines that it is nearly impossible to find wines from Germany made from any other grape. As I mentioned in my post on Kerner (which was bred in Germany but the only bottles I could find were from Italy), Riesling accounts for only around 20% of the total planting area of Germany, but it seems to occupy 95% of the shelf space devoted to German wines in American wine shops. German Pinot Noir (red and white) is becoming more common and you can occasionally find something like Scheurebe, Dornfelder, Kanzler or Silvaner if you look long enough, but if you come across a bottle of wine from Germany in your local shop, odds are really good that it's a Riesling.

Which is kind of a shame, because there are a lot of interesting, unique grapes being grown in Germany. As I mentioned in my post on Scheurebe, many of the unique grapes being grown in Germany are actually crossings that were bred at one of the many viticultural institutions located throughout that country. In places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, the climate is particularly suited to the cultivation of the vine and so many different varieties have been grown in those countries through the years. Many of Germany's wine growing regions are not quite as favorable as those in areas further south so few grape species have really thrived there. Over the past hundred years or so, many German viticulturalists have focused their energies on developing new grape varieties that can withstand the harsher conditions of some of these regions. The German people are also an efficient lot, so another aim of their grape breeding programs was to create high yielding vines that also produced high quality wine. While they have been fairly successful in overcoming many of their climatic issues through grape breeding, their search for an explosively yielding vine that produces high quality wine has thus far not been, ahem, fruitful.

One of the more well known German grape breeders was a man named Georg Scheu. Scheu (1879 - 1949) studied horticulture in the early 1900's and in 1909, he went to the institute at Alzey, where he remained until 1947, to study viticulture. In 1929, he discovered how leaf-roll disease was transmitted between vines (though the virus that is the underlying cause was not discovered until 1966) and initiated efforts to create clean, virus free vine stocks in nurseries and holding institutions. Though Scheu was an accomplished scientist and viticulturalist, most wine drinkers know him today, if they know him at all, from the grapes that he bred during his time in Alzey. The Scheurebe grape is his namesake variety and is the most well known of his creations, but he also created the Kanzler grape mentioned above as well as Siegerrebe, Faber and Regner. The grape we're interested in today, though, is one of his creations called Huxelrebe.

Huxelrebe was created in 1927 by crossing Chasselas with a grape called Muscat Précoce de Saumur. Here's how we got Muscat Précoce de Saumur: a Pinot Noir vine mutated into Pinot Noir Précoce (Frühburgunder to you Germans in the crowd) which gets its name from the fact that it ripens two weeks earlier than regular Pinot Noir, and that mutation was propagated, and then one of those mutated vines was self-pollinated and one of the resulting seeds (which is genetically very similar to but still distinct from Pinot Noir Précoce) was planted and grew into Muscat Précoce de Saumur. I have no idea if there is even a word for the kind of relationship that Huxelrebe therefore has to Pinot Noir, but it's kind of fun to think about. Huxelrebe was originally known as Alzey S 3962, but was later named for Fritz Huxel, a Germany nurseryman who first brought the grape to prominence in the 1950's. Huxelrebe is a prolific yielder that is also capable of very high sugar levels which, along with its susceptibility to botrytis infection, makes it a natural choice for sweet wine production. It is grown on about 635 hectares in Germany (just over 1500 acres) and about 25 hectares (60 acres) in the UK, but those numbers have been declining in recent years. Though it is a high-yielding variety, its aroma and flavor profile are quite assertive and this seems to have tempered most people's enthusiasm for it as a fine wine grape.

Recently I was able to find a half bottle of the 2008 Gysler Huxelrebe Beerenauslese from my friends at the Wine Bottega for around $35. In the glass the wine was a fairly light lemon gold color. The nose was intense with smoky, funky aromas of orange marmalade, orange peel, honey and dried apricot. On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity. It was very sweet with flavors of honey, orange creme, orange marmalade, and dried apricot. The wine was very well balanced and was a real delight to drink, though the nose smelled really odd and funky. It wasn't as complex as BA Riesling, but what it lacked in complexity, it certainly made up for in power with deep, intense pure citrus and stone fruit flavors. I had some duck foie gras pate in my refrigerator and this wine complemented it very nicely. It's not exactly a value wine, but I felt that the quality lined up pretty nicely with the price on it. I'd be interested in trying a table wine made from this grape, but suspect I'll be hard pressed to find one anytime soon.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Araignan Blanc, Riveirenc Gris, Riveirenc Blanc & Grenache Gris, Cotes du Brian, France

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:19:00 +0000

Araignan Blanc grapes
(aka Picardan)

It has been several months since I last did a Weird Blend Wednesday post, which is entirely too long, so today I'd like to dust the old feature off and talk a bit about a really interesting white wine I tried a few months ago from the Cotes du Brian region of the Languedoc in southern France. Back in August of last year, I wrote about a red wine from Clos Centeilles which was made from Picpoul Noir, Riveirenc Noir, Morastel Noir à Jus Blanc and Œillade grapes, all of which are pretty rare and very unusual. Clos Centeilles also makes a white wine made from a handful of local heirloom varieties, and today I'd like to take a look at some of those grapes and the wine that is made from them.
The Clos Centeilles "C" blanc is made from 35% Araignan Blanc, 30% Riveirenc Blanc, 30% Riveirenc Gris and 5% Grenache Gris*. Since we've already covered Grenache Gris, I'll mainly be focusing on the other three grapes that make up 95% of this particular wine.

Riveirenc Blanc

Araignan Blanc (pictured above) is perhaps the most well known of the bunch, but most people know it as Picardan, and it is one of the 18 approved varieties in the Chateauneuf-du-Pape AOC of the southern Rhone Valley. It is a very old grape variety and the first mention of it in print can be traced back to 1544 AD. It shares some synonyms with Bourboulenc and Clairette, though it doesn't appear that it is related to either of those grapes. The name Picardan is thought to come from a combination of the French words piquer (to sting, as in Picpoul de Pinet) and ardent (burning) because of its high acid content. The grape's primary synonym of Araignan was first mentioned in print in 1715, and is thought to come from the word araignée, or spider, because of the small hairs on the underside of the leaves which resemble spider's silk. There are currently only about 1.2 acres (less than a hectare) of Picardan in all of France and though a little bit finds its way into some Chateauneuf-du-Pape blends (like Chateau Beaucastel), chances are pretty good that this particular bottling has the highest percentage of Picardan of any wine in the world.

Riveirenc Gris

Riveirenc Blanc and Gris are color mutations of Riveirenc Noir, which we took a brief look at in my post on the red wine from Clos Centeilles. This group of grapes is more commonly known as Rivairenc or Aspiran, though very little acreage is devoted to any of the three varieties in France or elsewhere. The Noir is the most common of the three and it is thought that the grape may be referenced as early as the 15th Century under the name Esperan, but it is difficult to say for certain. The French registry of grape varieties spells the name of the grape Rivairenc and this is how it is listed in Wine Grapes, but the producer uses the Riveirenc spelling so that's what I've used as well. The name Rivairenc is thought to come from from the word ribairenc, which in the Occitan dialect means "riparian," or having to do with river banks, possibly because the vines were discovered on a river bank or because they grow particularly well there. Vouillamoz reports in Wine Grapes that his personal research indicates that there may be a parent/offspring relationship between Rivairenc and Cinsaut, but more markers need to be tested and since the third member of the family has not yet been identified, it is impossible to say what the precise nature of the relationship between the two grapes is. I cannot find any planting statistics for Rivairenc Blanc or Gris, so there is also a really good chance that the 30% of each in this particular wine is the highest proportion you're likely to find anywhere.

I picked up the 2009* Close Centeilles "C" Blanc from my friends at Curtis Liquors for around $20. This wine is a vin de pays from the Cotes du Brian, which I believe is in the area around Minervois in the Languedoc. In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color. The nose was fairly intense with aromas of green apple, apple cider, Meyer lemon, pastry dough, pineapple and melon. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity. There were broad, creamy flavors of pear, red apple, Meyer lemon creme and a touch of apple cider. This wine is fermented on its lees before being drawn off the heavier lees into a neutral container. It is stirred weekly for several months before being bottled for release and this stirring and lees contact definitely gives it a rich, creamy mouth-feel, though it does sharpen up a bit as it approaches room temperature. Rosemary George reviewed this wine on her website in 2010 and remarked that it is "not a wine to age," and I agree with her assessment, having tasted the wine about a year and a half after she did. It was an enjoyable wine, but I thought it was probably more interesting than good and much preferred the red from this estate. It is a rare opportunity to try grapes that you may otherwise never taste, though, and is good enough that I wouldn't consider it a mere curiosity.

*These figures are for the 2007 vintage. The winery website does not offer any more up-to-date information than this.

Moore's Diamond - Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Finger Lakes, New York, USA

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:22:00 +0000

When I was first learning about wine, I had a lot of trouble trying to understand what the term "foxy" meant when it was applied to native American grape varieties. At that time, I had only ever had wine that was made from Vitis vinifera grapes so the use of the word "foxy" to describe wines made from non-vinifera varieties was mystifying to me. The Oxford Companion to Wine's entry on "foxy" says that foxiness is "the peculiar flavour of many wines, particularly red wines, made from American vines and American hybrids," which isn't really all that helpful. The entry goes on to state that the Concord grape is the most well known foxy-tasting grape, "reeking of something closer to animal fur than fruit, flowers, or any other aroma associated with fine wine." This seems to suggest that the term comes from the fact that the grapes and wines taste kind of like fox fur, but that may not necessarily be the case. Writing in 1908, UP Hedrick, in his Grapes of New York (which you can peruse electronically here), has the following to say about the origin of the term foxy:

"Bailey gives the following interpretation of the word "fox" and its derivatives as applied to grapes: 'The term fox-grape was evidently applied to various kinds of native grapes in the early days, although it is now restricted to the vitis labrusca of the Atlantic slope. Several explanations have been given of the origin of the name fox-grape, some supposing that it came from a belief that foxes eat the grapes, others that the odor of the grape suggests that of the fox - an opinion to which Beverly subscribed nearly two centuries ago - and still others thinking that it was suggested by some resemblance of the leaves to a fox's track. William Bartram, writing at the beginning of this century, in the Medical Repository, is pronounced in his convictions: 'The strong, rancid smell of its ripe fruit, very like the effluvia arising from the body of the fox, gave rise to the specific name of this vine, and not, as many have imagined, from its being the favourite food of the animal: for the fox (at least the American species) seldom eats grapes or other fruit if he can get animal food.' I am inclined to suggest, however, that the name may have originated from the lively foxing or intoxicating qualities of the poor wine which was made from the wild grapes. At the present day we speak of 'foxiness' when we wish to recall the musk-like flavor of the wild Vitis labrusca; but this use of the term is of later origin, and was suggested by the name of the grape."' Bailey, L. H . Evolution of our Native Fruits: 5 1898." Peter May (whose book on Pinotage I reviewed here) passed along this link which has a thorough and interesting discussion on "foxiness" as well.

All of which is interesting, but unless you know what the "effluvia arising from the body of a fox" smells like, probably isn't really all that helpful. Judging by the number of threads devoted to the topic of foxiness on many wine message boards, I wasn't alone in my confusion. Many try to describe it as a musky flavor, which is a little more helpful but is still maddeningly vague enough to not be satisfactory. Still others describe it as a kind of grapey flavor, like Welch's grape juice or grape jelly, which I've found a little bit more helpful, but not totally accurate. The scientific explanation is that there are two chemicals, methyl anthranilate and O-aminoacetophenone, that are responsible for the taste and flavor perceptions that we regard as foxy. Methyl anthranilate (C₈H₉NO₂) is found in Concord grapes and many other fruits, but is also secreted by dog and fox musk glands and is responsible for the "sickly sweet" smell of rotting corpses. At full concentrations, its aroma is described as "grapey" and it is often used to flavor grape candies and drinks. O-aminoacetophenome is apparently another chemical with a particularly grapey aroma that is found in many native American grape varieties, but can also be found in the anal sac of the Japanese weasel (really).

Knowing all of the information above can get you part of the way to understanding what "foxiness" is, but the only real way to get a handle on what that term means is to try a foxy wine. Several years ago, still not knowing just what "foxy" meant, I found myself at Truro Vineyards in Truro, Massachusetts. My wife and I were going through a tasting of some of their wines, most of which are made from traditional Vitis vinifera varieties, when they poured me a wine from a blue bottle shaped like a lighthouse which they said was made from a grape called Moore's Diamond. When I stuck my nose in the glass, I knew immediately what "foxiness" was. I grew up in rural Georgia and my grandparents had a grape arbor in their back yard that was planted with Scuppernong grapes. Scuppernongs belong to the Vitis rotundifolia species which is also known as "muscadine" because they're very musky and have a very distinctive kind of taste which, it turns out, is what people mean when they talk about foxiness. It was a moment of great revelation as so many things suddenly became clear to me. I wasn't doing this blog at the time, but I recently came across another bottling of Truro's Diamond and decided to write a little bit about the grape.

Moore's Diamond was bred by Jacob Moore around 1870 by fertilizing a Concord vine with pollen from an Iona vine. Iona is itself a hybrid of Diana (or possibly Catawba) and an unknown Vitis vinifera vine, which makes Diamond a Vitis vinifera x labrusca hybrid. It was once very highly regarded and in 1908, UP Hedrick writes: "Diamond is surpassed in quality and beauty by few other grapes. When to its desirable fruit characters are added its earliness, hardiness, productiveness and vigor it is surpassed by no other green grape." He goes on to say: "We usually accord Niagara first place among green grapes but Diamond rivals it for the honor. The former attained high rank not only through merit but by much advertisement while Diamond has made its way by merit alone. If we consider the wants of the amateur and of the wine-maker as well as those of the commercial vineyardist, unquestionably Diamond must be accorded a high place
among the best all-around grapes." Hedrick was a fan of Diamond because he likes "the refreshing sprightliness of our native fox grapes," and feels that the introduction of some vinifera into the lineage gave Diamond a "touch of the exotic." The vine is also relatively cold hardy and carries many of the same resistances to disease as the other native American vines, but it is thin skinned and thus susceptible to many fungal diseases. Its popularity was never as high as Hedrick might have hoped, and today it is planted on less than 100 acres in New York state and in minuscule quantities across the northeastern and Midwestern United States.

Truro Vineyards way out towards the tip of Cape Cod makes a wine that they call Diamond White from the Moore's Diamond grape. This wine is non-vintage and comes in a blue tinted bottle shaped like a lighthouse. It cost me around $18 at a local wine event I recently attended. In the glass, the wine was a fairly light lemon gold color. The nose was very intense and smelled like the Platonic ideal of foxiness (meaning it was very musky and grapey). On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity and was medium sweet. There were flavors of fresh picked grapes with a little bit of white pear, sweet peach and green apple flavors. As with most wines that I try from native American grapes or hybrid grapes with predominately native American parentage, this wine tasted mostly like grape juice and very little else. It's not that most of these wines are bad, but rather that they're not very complex and many wine drinkers avoid them because they're simple and you almost always know what you're going to get. If you like sweet wines that taste like grape juice, then you're going to love this wine, but the price tag on it is pretty steep for what you're getting.

If you drink a lot of wines made from labrusca varieties or from foxy grapes, chances are that nearly all of them are sweet. I don't drink wines from these grapes habitually, but I can say that every wine that I've ever had from a foxy grape was sweet except for one. Arbor Hill in the Finger Lakes region of New York not only makes a dry wine from Moore's Diamond grapes, they age the wine in oak barrels for awhile before bottling too. They release the wine as a NV and it costs about $10.50 directly from the winery. In the glass this wine was a very pale silvery lemon color. The nose was explosively perfumed and was 100% musky grapes. On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and was bone dry. There wasn't a lot of fruit to the wine, but what was there was a little musky and grapey with a little bit of vague citrus as well. It was a really weird wine with a kind of salty, tangy nuttiness to it as well. The dominant flavor was still foxy grapes, but I think that because I have such a strong association of sweetness with that foxy grape flavor, this wine just ended up coming off as weird to me. Of all the wines I've tasted for this site, this was definitely one of the most bizarre and while I'm glad that I got to try it, I don't think it's something that I'll be seeking out again anytime soon.