Sparkling Teroldego - Finger Lakes, NY - Fringe Wine 1 Year Anniversary!

Tomorrow, September 17, will mark the one year anniversary of Fringe Wine!  Since it's a Saturday and I don't roll on Shabbos, I'm going to go ahead and get the birthday post out of the way today.

I started this blog one year ago because I knew I wanted to write about wine, but I didn't think that anybody would care what one more person has to say about Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay.  I'd always had an inclination towards unusual wines and decided that maybe that was an interesting little niche that I could explore.  My first ever post was written without the benefit of any tasting notes and just a quick glance at Wikipedia and, frankly, it's a little embarrassing to read today.  My next few posts weren't much better, but over time, I felt like I was starting to find my voice and was starting to figure out a format that worked for me.  October 2010 was the first full month the site was live and I got a total of 21 pageviews, which was fewer than one per day.  I didn't get over the 100 views for a month hurdle until January 2011, but traffic was increasing each month, which was gratifying.  By April 2011 I was over 1,000 pageviews per month and the site currently gets about 2,800 pageviews per month.  To anyone reading this as a repeat visitor or as a first time visitor, thanks for stopping by and I hope you found the site interesting and useful.

On a more personal note, the experience of writing the blog has been pretty amazing.  I decided to take some courses at Boston University and through the WSET to make sure I had a strong foundation for my writing and I fared pretty well in those courses and took away a lot of good information.  Nothing has compared with the knowledge I've gained in seeking out unusual wines and talking to wine shop proprietors and in doing the research for my posts.  I've felt the borders of my wine universe expand a little more every day I've done this and it has been great the whole way through.

When I first started, I was barely able to hit 100 grapes on the Wine Century Club's application.  One year later, I've been able to cross off almost every grape on the original list and have added quite a few more for a total of over 300.  Those who are interested can view my up-to-date Wine Century Club application here.  I'm also going to post my weird wine spreadsheet which interested parties can view here.  Those lists are growing every day and I hope to continue that trend for at least another year and hopefully for more than that.

This is the 91st post for the blog, which means I've been averaging a post about every four days, which I'm pretty happy with.  I hope to be able to pick up the pace a little in the coming year as I have a huge backlog of wines to drink and write about (as you can see if you take a look at the spreadsheet link above).  By far the most popular post on the blog is the on about Sangue di Giuda, which has 700 pageviews and accounts for about 5% of the total traffic on the site.  Lacrima di Morro d'Alba is in second place with just under 500 pageviews, and in a distant third is Chasselas.

In honor of Fringe Wine's one year birthday, the wine I'm going to write about here is a very rare "Triple Weird" wine.  What that means is that it actually satisfies all three of the rules for Fringe Wine on the left hand side of the page.  It's made from the Teroldego grape in a fully sparkling style in the Finger Lakes region of New York (to clarify, I'm not saying the Finger Lakes region is an unusual region, I'm saying that the Teroldego grape is unusual to find in this region).  When I first read about this wine, I actually planned my entire summer vacation trip so that I could be sure that I could pick up a bottle for myself and write about it.  The wine in question is the 2008 Red Tail Ridge Sparkling Teroldego, which I picked up at the winery for $35.

In the glass, the wine was a medium purple ruby color with vigorous bubbles.  The nose was a little shy with some black fruit aromas but mostly funky, yeasty kinds of smells.  On the palate, the wine was dry and medium bodied with acid on the higher side of medium and a little bit of tannic bite to it.  There were black fruit flavors of black cherry and blackberry with a touch of bitter, smoky charcoal.  It did have a touch of funk to it as well which added a nice bit of complexity without getting in the way.  The fruit flavors were purely represented, which isn't always easy with methode champenoise style wines, but this really delivered.  The flavors were dark and brooding but were presented in such a bright, lively way with the nice acidity and the bubbles.  This wine was a lot of fun to drink, but it was also interesting and complex.  If you find yourself in the Finger Lakes region, it's the kind of thing you can't afford to miss if interesting wines are at all your kind of thing.  They've also got a regular table wine bottling from their Teroldego grapes now that wasn't available on my visit, but I'm sure I'll be back before too long to see what other cool experiments they're trying out.

So, happy birthday to Fringe Wine and a huge thank you to everyone for reading and taking these journeys into some of the lesser known corners of the wine world.  I hope to be able to cover even more ground in the coming year and hope you will come along with me for the ride.

Teroldego - Trentino and Tuscany, Italy

I'm going to confess something: I'm kind of a geek.  I guess anyone who has read more than one of my posts probably could have figured that out, but I'm just going to come right out and say it here.  Part of why I love writing this website is that it gives me an outlet for the kind of geekery that I can't really let fly in my everyday life.  I love doing the research and learning about the minutiae of these unusual grapes.  I love exploring the nooks and crannies of the wine world to try and find hidden treasures and cool stories.  Today, for example, I was doing a little bit of background reading to get ready to post about Teroldego when I stumbled across an article in the journal Heredity called "Geneaology of Wine Grape Cultivars" (full citation: Vouillamoz, J., & Grando, M. (2006). Genealogy of wine grape cultivars: ‘Pinot’ is related to ‘Syrah’. Heredity, 97(2), 102-110).  I know, this dry, academic reading is what most people use to get through a particularly vicious attack of insomnia, but I love this stuff.  My day job is also at a big time research university, so I have full access to a lot of these journals.  Anyway, I started to read this article and it's talking about how for many years, scientists would look at the leaf shape of different grape varieties to try to determine the relation between different cultivars.  Needless to say, this was a very inexact science.  Recent progress in the field of genetics has allowed scientists to use genetic markers to identify parentage and sibling relationships between all these different grapes with much greater accuracy and with many interesting surprises (I'll spare you the excruciating details, but the method is similar to the method that forensic scientists use on DNA samples at crime scenes).  So I'm reading through this article and then looking through the references and picking up new articles and I look up and I've got 5 articles printed out in front of me and I figure it's probably time to stop and get to the matter at hand.

So, Teroldego, then.  It appears that there may be a sibling relationship between Teroldego and the Pinot family and there is likely a parent/offspring relationship between Teroldego and Lagrein and Marzemino (**UPDATE** Teroldego is definitely one parent of Lagrein, while the other is Schiava Gentile, according to: 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.).  It also turns out that Teroldego is a full sibling (meaning it has the same two parent vines) to a grape called Dureza, which is one of the parent grapes of Syrah.  This is interesting in light of a comment from Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat winery in California which is quoted in Oz Clarke's Grapes and Wines.  Clarke has Clarendon saying that California should have planted Teroldego rather than Merlot and Barbera and, furthermore, it is his belief that if Teroldego were planted on the slopes of Crozes-Hermitage rather than Syrah then the wine there would be greatly improved. Bold talk indeed.  Au Bon Climat is primarily a Pinot Noir producer and their terroir isn't necessarily conducive to the Teroldego grape, but I believe that they do have a little Teroldego under vine (according to Eric Asimov of the NYT), though I don't know if they actually bottle and sell any of it (there is no mention on their website).  It is possible in California to blend up to 25% of other grape varietals into a single-varietal bottling in California without mentioning it on the label, so its possible that they could use those grapes for that purpose.  Some California producers are notorious for adding high color wines like Syrah to their Pinot bottlings for added color and depth so it wouldn't necessarily surprise me, but I'm certainly not going to accuse the winemaker of doing that based on a hunch and some anecdotal evidence.

Teroldego's home is Trentino in the Trentino-Alto Adige region of Italy.  We've spent a little time in the Alto Adige visiting with Schiava.  Trentino is the southerly portion of this region where the Germanic/Austrian influence isn't quite as pronounced.  There are references to Teroldego from Trentino mentioned as far back as the 15th Century. The grape is well suited to warm weather, which may seem a little odd for northern Italy, but they have some areas in the valleys and river basins where the grape can get all the sun and warmth that it needs.  It is a thin-skinned variety that produces a deeply colored wine, somehow.  There are competing theories about the origin of the name of the grape.  I've read that a court in Vienna once called the wine "The Gold of the Tyrol," and somehow that ended up as "Teroldego."  I've also read that it has more to do with the wire harnesses, or "tirelles" used to trellis the vine.  Matt Kramer, in his Making Sense of Italian Wine contends that that the name derives from the Gernman word teer which means "tar," a flavor which Teroldego can sometimes take on.  Take your pick, I guess.

The first wine that I was able to try was the 2005 Teroldego Rotalino (the official DOC name of the region in Trentino where most Teroldego is grown, named for the gravelley river bottom plain called Campo Rotalino near the Adige river) Riserva from Mezzacorona.  I was able to pick this up from my friends at Bin Ends for about $20.  In the glass, the wine was a dense purple ruby color nearly all the way to the rim.  The nose was full of smoky black cherry and black plum with some blackberry and blueberry.  On the palate, the wine was close to full bodied with fairly high acid and very little tannin.  The grape can be tannic in its youth, but at 6 years out, most of that seemed to be pretty well integrated.  There were flavors of black plum, smoky earth, tart cherries and stewed blackberries.  The wine was much fruitier and exciting on the nose than on the palate.  The finish is kind of abrupt as the fruit really falls off rather than fade away.  People have mixed feelings about the age-ability of Teroldego, and after this bottle, I can understand the misgivings. 

Talk to people familiar with the grape and they'll tell you that Teroldego grows in Trentino and nowhere else; in fact, Bastianich and Lynch (in their Vino Italiano) quote Elisabetta Foradori, one of the leading producers of Teroldego in Trentino as saying "you can't find it anywhere in the world."  Well, somebody forgot to tell Poggio al Casone.  This estate grows Teroldego and bottles it under their "La Cattura" label with a little bit of Syrah added to it (the bottle I had was 90% Teroldego and 10% Syrah, but their website currently lists the blend as 85/15).  I picked my bottle up from the Gypsy Kitchen for about $16.  The wine was a deep purple ruby color in the glass and had aromas of black cherry and black plum with a bit of stewed black fruit and a smoky, meaty kind of aroma that I'm guessing may be from the touch of Syrah.  On the palate the wine was close to full bodied with medium acidity and soft, well-integrated tannins.  There was lush black cherry and plum fruit flavors grounded with some savory earthy notes and a nice long, evolving finish.  This wine was the better of the two and really shows what Teroldego is capable of.  It's very similar in style to a northern Rhone wine for a fraction of the cost of what many of those bottlings would run you.