Early Muscat - Rogue Valley, Oregon, USA

As I've mentioned many times before (such as in my posts on Emerald Riesling and Symphony), I'm a big fan of Dr. Harold Olmo.  Olmo was perhaps the most prolific and successful grape breeder in the history of the United States, but he was also a leading figure in many other areas of viticulture as well.  He was an early proponent of clonal selection, and this lengthy obituary (he died in 2006) of him credits him with changing California's relationship with the Chardonnay grape.  For many years, Chardonnay was unpopular in California because it wasn't very productive and the wines made from it weren't that great.  Olmo tested several different clonal variants of the grape to try and find more productive and higher quality vines, and it is thought that his success in this endeavor is responsible for Chardonnay's extraordinary popularity today.  Whether that's a good thing or not from a taste perspective is a very different question from whether it's a good thing or not from an economic perspective   Regardless of what your own personal feelings are about the Chardonnay grape, the fact remains that it has become a significant cash crop for California winemakers because the quality and the quantity of the grapes being grown is higher.

Not all of Olmo's discoveries and projects were such unequivocal successes.  Many of the grapes that he created for wine production were intended to be high-cropping vines that had good disease resistance and which could be grown in some of the hotter and drier regions of California where traditional vinifera varieties were unsuccessful.  Many of the grapes that he created are still grown in California today, though you rarely see any of their names on bottles because much of their production ends up as bulk wine.  Some people may see this as a failure on Olmo's part or may wish to criticize him for breeding bulk wine grapes, but one must remember that this was really what he was trying to do, and he was remarkably successful at it.  One should also note that while most of the production from these grapes ends up as bulk wine, some producers do try to make quality wines from them by limiting yields and carefully managing the vines in the vineyard and the results of their care can be very good in their own right.

Harold Olmo created table grapes in addition to creating wine grapes, and many of his creations can still be found on your supermarket shelves.  The first few grapes that Olmo released (in 1946 and 1958) were actually table grapes, as there was a big push at this particular time to create more seedless table grapes to supplement the Thompson seedless, which, for quite some time, was actually the only seedless table grape available in the US.  Many of his creations used various Muscat grapes as one of the parents (or somewhere in the pedigree), as the intense aromas and high sugar contents that the Muscat family was able to pass along to its offspring were very popular with consumers.  Olmo's first grape release was the table grape Perlette in 1946 (one of whose parents was the aforementioned Thompson seedless).  There were a handful of others over the next few years and then in 1958, Early Muscat was released (the actual crossing was purportedly in 1940, but quality trials take a really long time...Symphony, for example, was also first crossed in 1940 but wasn't released until 1981).

Early Muscat was created by crossing Muscat de Hamburg with a grape called Reine des Vignes in France and Koenigin der Weingaerten in German, both of which translate to "Queen of the Vineyards" (and which was the other parent for Olmo's first grape, Perlette).  Reine des Vignes was created by Hungarian breeder János Mathiász in 1916 by crossing a grape called Queen Elizabeth with Pearl of Csaba (which, incidentally, is also one of the parents of Irsai Olivér).  Pearl of Csaba was itself created in 1904, and one of its parents was called Muscat Courtillier, which is also known as Muscat Précoce de Saumur.  The "précoce" in the name means early, and the grape is known for its early ripening and short growing season, which makes it a popular choice among grape breeders.  This early ripening quality was passed along through the family tree, and, together with the Muscat flavors from its great-grandfather and its father, created the grape we now know as Early Muscat.

Early Muscat, like many of its forebears and relatives, was initially created as a table grape variety.  As we discussed in my post on the Lakemont and Himrod grapes, the qualities that breeders are looking for in a table grape are rarely the same as the qualities you'd want in a wine grape.  For the most part, table grapes are bred to be prolific yielders without any seeds and with very thin, mostly flavor-neutral skins.  It is possible to make wine from these grapes, but it is generally inadvisable.  Some winemakers do occasionally try it, though, and occasionally it works out well.  A few years back, some winemakers in Oregon noticed that Early Muscat grew really well there and decided to experiment with it.  It wasn't exactly a phenomenon, but these days a handful of different producers do grow the grape and make wine from it (which is, apparently, sometimes difficult to buy as consumers snatch up the wines almost as soon as they hit the shelves).

One of those producers is Del Rio Vineyards, located in the Rogue Valley of southwestern Oregon.  Del Rio makes a wine called Rose Jolee, which I picked up from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for around $10.  The most recent information on the winery's website indicates that the current blend for this wine (listed as NV on the PDF, but 2011 on the actual website) was 63% Early Muscat, 17% Riesling and 20% "red blend."  The 2009, which is the wine that I tried, is actually labeled Early Muscat, which means that it must have at least 90% of the stated variety in it,*  though it's obvious that there's still some "red blend" in this wine because Early Muscat is a white grape and this is a fairly deep salmon pink wine with a very light fizz to it.  The nose was intensely aromatic with strawberry, peach and lychee fruit along with fresh flowers and orange blossoms.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  It was pretty sweet with just a faint prickle of CO2.  There were flavors of strawberry candy, peaches, mandarin oranges and something a bit grapey as well.  The flavor profile was very fruity and kind of candy-ish, with the wine tasting a bit like cotton candy at times as well.  It wasn't aggressively floral, as some Muscat-based wines can be.  It's a summer slammer wine, really, that is meant to be gulped and gulped quickly for maximum enjoyment, and if you approach it with that kind of mindset, you'll probably find a lot to like about it.  It's not complex or deep or profound, but it is tasty and easy to drink and I'm totally fine with that sometimes.

*Remember that the rules are a little different in Oregon.  In California and most of the rest of the US, if a variety is stated on the label, the wine only has to be composed of at least 75% of the stated variety.  Oregon's laws dictate that the stated variety must make up at least 90% of the wine, which explains why the bottle on the PDF shelftalker from their website does not have any varietal designation, if the most recent bottlings are only 63% Early Muscat.

Auxerrois - Alsace, France; Oregon, USA & Wormeldange Nussbaum, Luxembourg

Auxerrois is a grape that frequently travels in disguise.  It covers nearly 5,000 acres of land in Alsace, more than Pinot Gris or Pinot Blanc, but you virtually never see its name on the label of a Alsatian wine.  Quite a bit of it finds its way into wines labeled "Edelzwicker", which is a generic term for any blended wine in Alsace.  Another portion of it ends up in the sparkling wines of Alsace which are simply labeled Cremant d'Alsace.  The most common wines that Auxerrois grapes end up in, though, are actually varietally labeled wines, but they are labeled as Pinot Blanc.  Exactly why has always eluded me but the fact of the matter is if you buy a wine from Alsace that is labeled as Pinot Blanc, there's a better than average chance that there's some Auxerrois juice in there somewhere.  That wouldn't be all that surprising as most regions allow some percentage of varietally labeled wines to be made up of other grapes, but it is possible that an Alsatian Pinot Blanc can actually be made up mostly of Auxerrois juice, or possibly even be 100% Auxerrois.  How can this be?

As mentioned above, I'm not exactly sure about the answer, but have found two explanations that are pretty similar.  According to Wikipedia, the words Pinot Blanc on a label in Alsace don't refer to a grape variety but rather to a white wine that is made from any of the Pinot varieties, which, according to the authorities, are Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir and Pinot Auxerrois, which is the same as Auxerrois blanc.  The other theory I've seen in a few places (like the Wall Street Journal and whatever this is) simply states that the law says that wines labeled as Pinot Blanc can be made from either Pinot Blanc or Auxerrois with each grape allowed to comprise any part of the blend, from 0% to 100%.  The Alsatian winemaker in this video indicates that the latter explanation is essentially right, though his reading of the law is that if a wine has at least 1% Pinot Blanc and the rest is Auxerrois, it is labeled as Pinot Blanc.  I'm having a rather difficult time navigating the INAO website in order to find the relevant bit of legislation, so I'm afraid I can't really weigh in on the matter, though I do find myself leaning towards the latter explanation since it seems to have the most support online across sources and since I've not heard of Pinot Gris or Pinot Noir ever being used in Pinot Blanc labeled wines.

Whatever the case may be, it seems like it might be important to suss out the exact relationship between Auxerrois and Pinot Blanc as most explanations seem to hinge on it to some extent.  Some sources indicate that Auxerrois is a clone/mutation of Pinot Noir, which, if true, would make it virtually identical to Pinot Blanc, as both would be simply white-berried mutations of the same parent plant.  It also would explain the source for the name Pinot Auxerrois and would lend some credence to Wikipedia's assertion that the INAO regards it as a member of the Pinot family.  Other sources indicate that Auxerrois is a sibling of Pinot Blanc, which would mean that the two grapes shared the same parentage and, further, that Auxerrois is a sibling to Pinot Noir as well.  This explanation would seem to lend more credence to the second explanation above as it would mean that Auxerrois wasn't a member of the Pinot family (in the genetic sense, where members of a grape "family" are all clones from a single parent vine and not in the more common sense where members of a family are parents, siblings, cousins, etc.) but was related in some way that could explain its being lumped together with Pinot Blanc.

Though both of those explanations have some degree of explanatory power in trying to understand the INAO laws, both of them are wrong.  In 1999, a team at UC Davis found that the grapes Pinot Noir (or one of the Pinots, in any case) and Gouais Blanc were the parents of a slew of French grapes such as Aligoté, Gamay and Chardonnay, among others (Bowers, J., Boursiquot, J., This, P., Chu, K., Johansson, H., & Meredith, C. (1999). Historical Genetics: The Parentage of Chardonnay, Gamay, and Other Wine Grapes of Northeastern France. Science, 285(5433), 1562).  One of those offspring was none other than Auxerrois, which means that Auxerrois is related to Pinot Blanc, but as an offspring rather than as a clonal variant or a sibling (remember that Pinot Blanc is simply a mutation of Pinot Noir and that they are genetically indistinguishable using modern DNA analyses, so for pedigree reconstruction and family relation purposes, they're the same grape).  This also means that Auxerrois is a full sibling of Chardonnay, Gamay Noir, Aligoté, Romorantin and Melon (more commonly known as Muscadet), among others.

To add to the confusion, the name Auxerrois is also used for a handful of other grapes.  In the Moselle region of France, Chardonnay was once known as Auxerrois Blanc while Auxerrois proper is known as Auxerrois Blanc de Laquenexy.  I don't know what, who or where Laquenexy is, so if someone else knows, please enlighten me.  Auxerrois is also occasionally used to refer to Malbec in the Cahors region of France, though the two grapes are not related to one another.  In Alsace, Pinot Gris is sometimes known as Auxerrois Gris, though I don't believe that term ever finds its way onto a bottle.

As mentioned above, Auxerrois is most widely grown in the Alsace region of France, but it is planted in limited quantities in Germany and is especially prized in the tiny country of Luxembourg, which is located just west of Germany and just south of Belgium.  The entire country of Luxembourg is fewer than 1000 square miles and has a population of about half a million.  The entire country has about 3200 acres planted to the vine, which is less than the total amount of Auxerrois grown in Alsace.  Luxembourg is pretty far north so ripening is an issue here, but since Auxerrois is pretty naturally low in acid, slightly under-ripe versions are palatable and, some might argue, more interesting than wines made from fully ripened grapes.  The Mosel River forms part of the country's border with Germany to the southeast and this is where much of the vineyard land is concentrated.

As you might imagine, Luxembourg doesn't produce a ton of wine, but I was able to find a bottle of the 2009 Clos des Rochers Auxerrois from the Wormeldange Nussbaum site in Luxembourg.  The Cru system in Luxembourg appears to not be linked to geography (geographically all Luxembourg wines fall into the Moselle Luxembourgeoise appellation) but rather to the evaluations of a tasting panel who score the wines on a 20 point scale. This wine was labeled as Grand Premier Cru, which is the highest level, and which means that the wine was submitted for tasting at least three times, with one of those tastings happening prior to bottling.  The wine is then tasted again after bottling and if it is scored higher than 16, it can be re-submitted for a third tasting.  If it scores above an 18 at the third tasting, then and only then can it be labeled Grand Premier Cru (it's an odd system you can read more about here).  I picked this bottle up for about $15 from my friends at Bin Ends.  In the glass this wine was a pale silvery lemon color with greenish tints.  The nose was moderately intense with white peach, lemon peel, honey and honeysuckle aromas.  In the glass the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  It was off-dry with flavors of ripe peaches, pineapple, orange cream, ripe pear and honey.  It was a big, ripe, round wine that was somewhat Riesling-like but which lacked the laser sharp acidity that is the hallmark of great Rieslings.  I enjoyed the wine quite a bit and found it to be a very good value at only $15.

The next wine that I was able to try was the 2009 Adelsheim Ribbon Springs Vineyard Auxerrois from Oregon.  I picked this wine up locally for about $22.  In the glass this wine was a medium silvery lemon color.  The nose was moderately intense with delicate ripe pear and honey notes.  The aroma kind of reminded me of clean river water as well.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were racy flavors of green apple and lime with a touch of white pear.  The finish was clean and minerally, if a bit tart.  This wine walks the fine balance between tart citrus and plump white fruits very well and the clean, stony finish is refreshing and lovely.  It was much drier than the Luxembourg wine and also a bit leaner and more delicate as well.  It's a nice wine but not really worth the step up in price from the Luxembourg wine.

The last wine that I tried was the 2010 Valentin Zusslin "Pinot d'Alsace" Auxerrois from Alsace.  It can be difficult to find Alsatian Auxerrois that is labeled as such, so I was pretty excited when I found this bottle over at the Wine Bottega for about $25.  In the glass this wine was a medium lemon gold color.  On the nose the wine was fairly intense with aromas of peach, lemon curd, green tea, green apples and a touch of apple cider.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were racy flavors of ripe peach, green apple and apple cider.  The flavors were pure and very intense, but overall the wine was nicely balanced with good acidity and a nice, clean, minerally finish.  It had the intensity of the Luxembourg wine but was dry like the Oregon wine and really integrated the best qualities of both of those wines nicely.  It was the most expensive of the three wines, but I felt like it was really worth the money.

I've always enjoyed Pinot Blanc wines from Alsace (especially Zind-Humbrecht's bottling), but I've found that I generally don't like Pinot Blanc based wines from other areas.  Tasting through these three wines, I think that it's pretty clear that it's the presence of the Auxerrois grape that I'm really responding to.  Auxerrois has a reputation of making flabby, low-acid wines, but I found that the acid content in these three wines was nicely managed and the purity and intensity of the fruit really put the best examples over the top.  I'd definitely recommend picking one up if you come across it, especially with the warmer months of summer on the way.

Pinot Meunier - Willamette Valley, Oregon, USA

Today marks the 100th post on Fringe Wine!  When I started a little over a year ago, I had only three bottles in my cellar and I wondered whether I would be able to find enough unusual grapes to warrant having a site that was dedicated exclusively to them.  I now have over 100 unusual bottles in my cellar and about 20 tasting notes written up that should keep this site active for at least another 100 posts!

To celebrate, I generally like to open up some bubbly wine, but I don't currently have any tasting notes written on any celebratory bubbles, so I figured I'd do the next best thing.  Today's grape is Pinot Meunier, which is one of the three major grapes of the Champagne region in France.  What makes this wine unusual is that it is a still red wine made from Meunier grapes grown and vinified in Oregon. I visited Oregon wine country a few years ago to sample their Pinot Noir wines and left profoundly impressed.  I didn't run across any Pinot Meunier while I was out there, but as we will see, it makes sense that it's grown in the same kinds of regions that Pinot Noir thrives in.

You might guess just from looking at the name of the grape that it has some relation to Pinot Noir, and you'd be right.  Just what the relationship is is a little more complicated, though.  A study in 2000 concluded that Meunier was likely one of the parents of Pinot Noir, but more recent genetic testing has not only disproved that, but it has also found much more interesting stuff.  The dummy version that you'll find most places today is that Meunier is a mutation of Pinot Noir, and that's true, but it's not the whole story.  What Meunier actually is is a chimera, which in botanical terms means that the plant itself is made up of two genetically distinct kinds of tissue.  In most organisms, cells taken from any part of the organism will have identical DNA.  Cells taken from your nose will have the same DNA as cells taken from your heart or your blood cells.  In chimeras, one part of the organism is genetically distinct from the other parts, though all the parts still co-exist within a single organism.

The whole story is complicated, but essentially what's going on is this.  There are different layers of cells throughout the plant and what has happened with Meunier is that one of those layers is genetically different from the others.  In Meunier's case, this cell layer is responsible for the downy white appearance of its leaves which gives it its name (Meunier is derived from the French word for "miller," or baker, due to its resemblance to flour).  Sometimes this mutated cellular layer gets turned off or overridden by the other layers and you end up with leaves that have sections that have the white hairs and sections that don't sometimes on the same leaf!  Chimeras aren't incredibly rare in the plant kingdom, but they're not especially common either and Pinot Meunier is the only example of a chimera in the world of commercially grown grapes that I am aware of (though there certainly could be others).

The study mentioned above that discovered the chimerical nature of Meunier also stripped the cell layers out and propagated new plants from both the mutated layer and the non-mutated cells to see what would happen.  What they  found was that the normal cells ended up making a plant very similar to Pinot Noir while the mutated cells created a dwarf plant that had the characteristic downy white hairs on the leaves.  Neither plant, though, resembled Pinot Meunier itself, indicating that it was the interplay between the normal and the mutated cell layers that give the Meunier plant its characteristics.  Those interested in checking the article to see if my science holds up (keeping in mind that I'm not a professional botanist or geneticist) can look it up through this citation:

Franks T, Botta R, Thomas MR (2002) Chimerism in grapevines: implications for cultivar identity, ancestry and genetic improvement.  Theor Appl Genet 104: 192-199.

So now that we have the geekery out of the way, let's talk a little about Meunier.  As mentioned above, it is best known for its role in the production of sparkling wine in Champagne. Growers there like it because it buds later and ripens earlier than Pinot Noir, meaning it has a shorter growing season and attains ripeness more often than Pinot Noir (which is kind of a mixed blessing for sparkling wine production).  This ripeness, it is said, gives richness, body and weight to the final Champagne blend.  For many years, producers didn't want to admit the use of any Pinot Meunier (excepting Krug who proudly acknowledged its use) though that stigma seems to be slipping away.  It is thought that Meunier covers about 40% of the vineyard area in Champagne, making it the most widely grown grape there, though it is giving ground to modern plantings which emphasize Chardonnay and Pinot Noir over Meunier.

The grape is also grown in Germany where it is knowns as schwarzriesling (black riesling), Müllerrebe, and/or Müller-Traube.  It covers about 2,500 hectares of land in Germany and is gaining popularity.  Meunier also has a long history in Australia, where still wine production from the grape actually pre-dates Pinot Noir production.  Current plantings are scant, though, at a mere 150 hectares, mostly used in sparkling wine production.  There are also some plantings in the USA, again, mostly used for sparkling wine production.  I had an example from a winery on Long Island a few years back that was pretty unmemorable as well.

And then there's this bottle from the Willamette Valley in Oregon.  I was able to find a bottle of the 2007 Willakenzie Estate Pinot Meunier from a local shop for about $27.  In the glass, the wine was a medium crimson ruby color.  The nose was fairly aromatic with juicy strawberry, tea leaf, raspberry and forest floor characteristics.  On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with acidity on the higher side of medium and low tannins.  There were flavors of strawberry and raspberry fruit along with black tea, baking spice and a touch red cherry.  The alcohol seemed a little hot and slightly out of balance, but overall, it was a very nice wine. The overall impression from this wine is very similar to Pinot Noir and I would have liked to taste this side by side with a Pinot Noir from the same vintage and producer to see what the differences really are.  If I had this served to me at a blind tasting, I would peg it as Pinot Noir every single time and probably wouldn't hesitate about it.  If you are a fan of Pinot Noir, you should definitely give Meunier a shot, if you can track a bottle down.