Sakonnet Vineyards - Cock of the Walk Red

Sakonnet Vineyards is located in Little Compton, Rhode Island, just a few miles outside of Newport. They are the largest producer of wines in New England, and have been making wines since 1975. They have a wide variety of wines available, some from traditional vinifera varietals and some from hybrids. I visited the winery in July of 2010 and tasted through a wide variety of their offerings. The wine I will be discussing here is their Cock of the Walk Red, a blend of 75% Lemberger (Blaufrankish), 22% Cabernet Franc and 3% Chancellor.

We've run into Lemberger here before. It is a major grape in the production of Bull's Blood in Hungary, though it is perhaps best known for wines produced from it in Austria and Germany. Kiona Vineyards of Washington state make a very nice domestic version of Lemberger. Lemberger is a pretty versatile food wine with nice acidity and a flavor that reminds me of a spicier Pinot Noir.

Chancellor is a Seibel crossing (Seibel 7053, specifically), that I had not heard of prior to visiting Sakonnet. It's hard for me to say just what wine produced from Chancellor might taste like, as it only comprises 3% of the blend here and the only bottling I have seen that is from 100% Chancellor grapes is vinified into a port-style wine at Sakonnet. My notes from my tasting at Sakonnet indicate that there were a lot of dried fruit flavors like fig and prune, but I'd hesitate to make any kinds of statements about typicity for the grape. Anyone who's had a true Port and also a table wine made from Touriga Nacional knows that they are two very different experiences, despite the fact that Touriga is the dominant grape in the Port blend.

In any case, I revisited Sakonnet in October to pick up a bottle of their Cock of the Walk red for $15. When I tasted it in July, I wrote "Gamey, earthy nose. Smooth & rich...raspberry flavors dominate. Very very fruity." I'm publishing my initial tasting notes because when I got the bottle home, I had an entirely different experience and would like to take this opportunity to share a cautionary tale.

The Cock of the Walk red from Sakonnet is a non-vintage wine. Sakonnet is not unique in this; many wineries produce NV offerings, blending wines from different years in order to create something like a homogenous product (NV Champagne is the obvious analogy here). The idea is that every bottle, no matter when you buy it, will taste as much as possible like the wine tasted the last time you had it. The problem is, when you are looking at the bottles in their tasting room, you have no indication of when the bottle you are holding was produced. As the winery produces more of the NV wine, you are not sure what they do with the unsold bottles. They could take them off the shelf and not sell them, but it's doubtful that that is what happens. What's more likely, and what I think happened to me, is that the unsold bottles from previous production runs stay on the shelves and age, sometimes for far too long and often in less than ideal conditions. You can bet your life, though, that the bottles they are opening at the tasting bar are as fresh as can be.

I bring this up because the wine that I opened at home was perhaps at one point in time similar to the wine I had in the tasting room, but at the time that I actually opened it, it was deader than dead. The color was gone from the wine, leaving a pale burgundy color with orange tints to it. The fruit was totally gone from this wine. It was all damp earth and astringency. This wine was totally dried out and tasted like it sat on the shelf for too long and died in the bottle.

These are the hazards that one faces when one purchases a non-vintage bottle of wine, especially from a producer that one is not intimately familiar with. Sakonnet is a bit of a tourist spot, and examples like this call into question their commitment to quality. A more fastidious producer would have some indication of at least the bottling date of the wine and would take better care to not leave dried out bottles on the sales shelf. The bottle I reached for was right up front on the sales shelf, not buried in the back and certainly not covered in a film of dust. I am not accusing them of any willful malevolence, only carelessness. I have only poured out three bottles of wine in my life, and this was the third. I could not finish my first glass.

Sakonnet does have other tasty wines in their portfolio, and the grounds are beautiful and well worth a visit for those in the New England area, but exercise caution around their NV bottlings. The grapes that these wines are made from are capable of producing quality wine, and hopefully I will be able to cover them in the future from more fastidious producers.