Marquette - Minnesota, USA

*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.

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

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.

Vergennes - Finger Lakes, New York, USA

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.

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

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.

Seyval Blanc - Haverhill, Massachusetts, USA

Hello friends and neighbors and welcome to Fringe Wine's 250th post!  We've covered hundreds of grapes over the course of the previous 249 posts, but there are still literally thousands of others out there.  My ambition is not to try all of them, but merely to try as many as I can and write what I learn about them and what I think about the wines they produce.  Today I'd like to take a look at a hybrid grape that's relatively common around where I live (the northeastern United States) and in a few other (cold climate) places, but which isn't very well known outside of these limited areas.  The grape I'm talking about is called Seyval Blanc, or more cumbersomely Seyve-Villard 5276.  It was created by the French father and son-in-law team of Victor Villard and Bertille Seyve who were themselves disciples of the great French hybridizer Albert Seibel, creator of thousands of grapes like Chancellor and Verdelet.  Bertille Seyve was also the father of Joannes Seyve, who created the Chambourcin grape, and Bertille Seyve, Jr., who also tried his hand at breeding grapes, but was not as successful as his brother and father.

Seyval Blanc was created in Saint-Vallier, France (the name Seyval is a contraction of Seyve and Vallier), by crossing Seibel 5656 with Rayon d'Or.  Both of these grapes are complex hybrids, which just means that they have more than two different grape species in their 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 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.  This pedigree chart (from the publisher of Wine Grapes) shows just how complex Seyval Blanc's lineage is (it is erroneously listed as Seibel 5276 on the chart and is on the third row from the bottom towards the left of page 2).  While Seyval Blanc isn't quite as complex as Traminette, there are still many different grape species in its pedigree as well as several vinifera vines as well.

Seyval Blanc is also important as a parent variety and was used to breed Cayuga White, Chardonel, La Crosse and Melody, among others.  It is prized by growers and breeders alike for its high yields, disease resistance and its cold hardiness as well as its lack of foxy aromas and flavors.  It can generally be found in cool climate areas where other varieties, especially vinifera varieties, are unable to get fully ripe.  It was at one time the most widely planted grape in the UK, but its plantings have fallen to less than 100 hectares as of 2009 (which is still 6.5% of the total vineyard area of the country, though).  It is also popular in Canada and the mid-western and northeastern United States, where it was once the most widely planted grape in that region (and still may be, but I haven't seen any recent statistics).

Inside the barn/tasting room

A few months back, I was in northern Massachusetts and paid a visit to Willow Spring Vineyards in Haverhill.  I met with Jim Parker, owner of the winery, and he gave me a tour of his vineyards and of the grand centerpiece of the whole endeavor, the 18th Century barn located on the property.  When Jim and Cindy bought the property, the barn was in a state of dilapidation and disrepair, as was the land surrounding it.  Very shortly after finalizing the purchase, the pair received a letter from the city building inspector informing them that the barn was a condemned building and must be either torn down immediately or repaired.  Jim promised the barn's former owner that he would fix up the property, and so that's exactly what he set out to do.  Jim's a handy guy and so he decided to do the renovation himself.  He bought the property in 2001 and has been working on it for more than 10 years at this point, but the finished (or near finished) product is remarkable.  When I arrived for my scheduled visit, Jim was out front with some of his friends and a backhoe putting the finishing touches on the front entrace.  That entrance leads into the tasting room which still has much of the original lumber used to build the barn.  It's a wide open area that also doubles as an event center.  There's a large wraparound porch that Jim has added that looks out onto his vines.  The winery itself is located underneath the main floor of the barn (see the white door beneath the deck in the picture below).

Exterior of barn.  The wraparound deck is now covered.

Jim knew when he bought the property that he wanted to grow something on the land, but wasn't sure exactly what.  After visiting a micro brewery with some friends on a ski trip, Jim's friends suggested that he grow hops, but for some reason, Jim said he saw vines growing on the property.  He had never tried to grow grapes before, but that didn't stop him from jumping in with both feet.  Jim read widely and voraciously on viticulture and enology, met other local winemakers and went to conferences to learn as much as he could.  He started out planting Vignoles, Seyval Blanc, Marechal Foch and Leon Millot and has since added a few vines of Chardonnay as well.  The vineyards are on a south facing slope so they get maximum exposure to the sun and the cold air flows down the hill to protect the vines from frost, which is very important this far north.  Jim and his friends tend to the vines themselves and Jim's daughter Brandi has recently joined the team as head winemaker after an apprenticeship at another local winery.  When I visited, Willow Spring was available to visit by appointment only, though they plan to open to the public soon.  Those interested in visiting can email Jim directly at jim.willowspring@yahoo.com, and I highly recommend that you do as the barn is beautiful and Jim is an engaging and gracious host whose enthusiasm for his project is infectious.

When I was there, I picked up a bottle of his Leon Millot, which I'll be writing about a bit later, as well as the last bottle of his 2011 Seyval Blanc (his wines are not labeled with a vintage, though they are vintage wines, and he told me this was the 2011).  This bottle cost about $14 in the tasting room.  In the glass the wine was a very pale silvery lemon color.  The nose was somewhat reserved with aromas of green melon, pear, golden apple and banana.  On the palate the wine was light bodied with high acidity.  It was maybe just a touch off-dry with flavors of lime, green apple, tart pineapple and green melon.  It clocks in at only 11.5% abv and is lean, racy and sharp.  I love high acid white wines and this particular bottle was right up my alley.  It's difficult to believe that these guys have only been making wine for a few vintages as this was a very polished effort that definitely shows a lot of promise.  Willow Spring is a winery to keep an eye on and is a place I will certainly be visiting again before too long.

Those interested in learning more about Willow Spring should check out this video feature on YouTube and this article.  

Traminette - Finger Lakes, New York, USA

Hello and welcome to Fringe Wine's first post of 2013.  I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and is having a happy young new year!  I figured I'd ease back into the blogging game by taking a look at a grape I came across during my trip to the Finger Lakes region of New York a few years back.  That trip turned out to be a fertile one, as this is the 15th post I've written about some wine I picked up while I was out there.  It is, unfortunately, also the last for awhile.  I still have many wines from that trip in my cellar, but for the most part, they're probably a bit too mainstream for this site.  I do hope to re-visit the region in the not-too-distant future, and hopefully I can find a few more unusual and interesting things then.  In the meantime, I still have many interesting grapes and wines to share with you in the coming year, so let's go ahead and get started!

Traminette is a hybrid grape with a lot of different grape species in its pedigree.  Its parents are  Gewürztraminer, which isn't too complicated, and Joannes Seyve 23.416, which is where things get crazy on a couple of different fronts.  Let's start with the grape itself: Joannes Seyve 23.416 is a cross of Bertille Seyve 4825 and Chancellor.  Bertille Seyve 4825 is not itself important as a commercial grape, but it has been somewhat important for grape breeders, and you can get a sense for how complicated its pedigree is from this chart, which is from Robinson, Harding & Vouillamoz's Wine Grapes (and which is freely available on their website due to printing issues with the book).  As you can see, Bertille Seyve 4825 (left side of the page, about half way down) has a lot of grapes in its family tree, and those grapes are from several different Vitis species, such as riparia, labrusca, aestivalis, lincecumii, rupestris, cinerea and vinifera which means that not only is Bertille Seyve 4825 itself a very complex hybrid, its offspring and its offspring's offspring are as well.

You may have also noted that we've been using two different human names for some of these crosses and these two names have a surname in common.  Joannes Seyve (1900-1966) was a French biochemist who also apparently bred grapes, as did many other members of his family.  Joannes's best known creation is Chambourcin, which we looked at not too long ago.  His father and brother were both named Bertille Seyve and both also bred grapes, though the father was more accomplished than the son.  Bertille Seyve Sr. worked closely with his own father-in-law Victor Villard, who was also a noted and successful grape breeder.  Seyve and Villard were essentially carrying on the work of Albert Seibel (who created Verdelet and Chancellor among many others) and all of the Seyve family members used Seibel crossings liberally in their own works.  The most successful Seyve-Villard crossing is Seyval Blanc, which you can read more about here.

Traminette, though, is not a Seibel or a Seyve crossing and only belongs to that group known as the French hybrids by virtue of its parentage.  You see, Traminette was created at the University of Illinois by Herb Barrett in 1965 in an effort to create large clustered table grapes with the characteristic spicy tang of Gewürztraminer.  Barrett sent the seeds from his crossing to Cornell's grape breeding program in 1968.  The seed was planted and fruit was first observed in 1971.  The vine was selected and propagated starting in 1974 under the lovely name NY65.533.13.  The vine's roots are phylloxera resistant, so grafting is unnecessary.  It is moderately winter hardy, but much more hardy than Gewürztraminer, and when it does suffer damage from cold conditions, it is typically the trunk rather than the buds which are harmed (which is not really a good thing since severe enough trunk damage can kill the entire vine).

The vine typically ripens in the first half of October in New York state.  Traminette's acidity level stays relatively high for a short while during the ripening process, and its acidity is generally higher than its parent Gewürztraminer.  It lacks the unwelcome foxy aromas and flavors of many hybrid grapes while also maintaining some of the characteristic floral and spice notes of Gewürztraminer, though the grape purportedly does not have the bitterness that turns so many people off to its parent.  These flavor characteristics can be enhanced with prolonged skin contact (12 to 48 hours) at fairly low temperatures (40 -50 degrees Fahrenheit)  prior to fermentation.  The berries and leaves are moderately resistant to a variety of mildews, though the leaves are susceptible to downy mildew.  In 1996, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station officially named the grape Traminette, making it the fifth grape named by that group.*

I was able to try two different wines made from the Traminette grape.  The first was the 2009 Fulkerson Traminette from the Finger Lakes region of New York, which I picked up at the winery for around $12.  In the glass, the wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was moderately intense with grapefruit, lychee and peach aromas along with something vaguely floral as well.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with low acidity.  It was sweet with flavors of peach, mandarin orange, lychee, rose water and pink grapefruit.  The low acid was a problem for me, as the sugar in the wine tasted clumsy and off-balance without it.  It was also a little bitter and soapy as well, which I really don't have an explanation for.  I'm generally a fan of Gewürztraminer, and this wine had a lot of Gewürz character to it, but it really picked up a lot of the bad things Gewürz brings to the table without enough of the good.  It was probably the best of the four Fulkerson wines that I picked up (Vincent, Dornfelder and Lakemont/Himrod) and it is a decent wine for the money, but it's not something that I would find myself consistently reaching for.

The second wine that I tried was the 2009 McGregor Vineyards Traminette from the Finger Lakes, which I picked up in their tasting room for around $16.  In the glass the wine was a fairly light silvery lemon color.  The nose was moderately intense with grapefruit, baking spice, lychee, and pear aromas with something vaguely floral as well.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  It was maybe a little sweeter than off-dry with flavors of lime, pink grapefruit, lychee, green apple and honeysuckle flower.  This wine was almost searingly tart and had acid to burn.  I generally prefer my wines to be more like this, but I found myself wishing that I had something in between these two examples, as that's where I thought the real balance probably was.  Overall, I thought they both kind of tasted like more restrained versions of Gewürztraminer, so if the powerful floral and spice characteristics of that grape are too much for you, then Traminette may be worth a shot.  I personally love the rich heady perfume of Gewürztraminer and don't think that these wines are really a fair substitute for wines made from that grape, but they're interesting and characterful in their own right and are priced much lower than their European counterparts.

*I have heavily leaned on their press release for much of the information in this post.  The release can be read in full here.

Vidal Blanc - Massachusetts and Finger Lakes, New York, USA

Vidal Blanc is either a grape you've never heard of or a grape that you can't get away from, depending on where you live and, to some extent, how you shop.  Here in the cold northeastern United States, Vidal is seemingly everywhere, but only if you go to the local wineries to sample their wares.  It is still difficult to find on store shelves in the Boston area, and if you do run across one in your local shop, chances are it's a Canadian ice wine.  I've made many visits to most of the wineries in Massachusetts and to many others throughout New England, though, and I came across so many Vidal Blanc based wines that, for awhile, I thought that perhaps Vidal Blanc wasn't really a fringe grape.  I was surprised, though, when I saw some of the planting statistics for the grape.  Canada certainly leads the way in Vidal plantings at nearly 2,000 acres, much of which is ultimately used to make ice wine, but I was shocked to learn that Virginia actually leads the way in US plantings of Vidal at 150 acres,* followed closely by Michigan  (145 acres) and Missouri (118 acres) before dropping off precipitously to 35 acres in Indiana and 32 in Illinois.  Clearly the vine isn't quite as ubiquitous as it seemed to me, so I decided to write about the Vidal Blanc grape itself and a few local wines that I've come across recently.

Vidal Blanc was created in 1930 by Jean-Louis Vidal, a French grape breeder who was trying to create new grapes for Cognac production.  Jean-Louis created Vidal Blanc by crossing Ugni Blanc (aka Trebbiano Toscano, one the grapes still most commonly used to make Cognac) with Rayon d'Or, which is itself a hybrid created by our old friend Albert Seibel by crossing two other Seibel hybrid grapes together (Seibel 405 & 2007, for those filling out your pedigree charts at home).  Jean-Louis Vidal created several thousand different grapes throughout his career, but Vidal Blanc has definitely been the most successful and is easily the most widely cultivated grape bred by him.  Even though the grape was created in France by a French breeder, it is virtually non-existent there today.

Vidal Blanc came to the New World, or at least to Canada, in 1945, when a man named Adhémar de Chaunac imported 35 French hybrids (one of which was Vidal Blanc) and four vinifera varieties into Canada.  De Chaunac was the technical director at TG Bright winery in Niagara Falls, and he was looking for new grapes to grow at his winery other than the foxy native American varieties that had been widely used to that point in Canadian wine history.  Most plantings with vinifera varieties had not gone well, as they were generally unable to tolerate the harsh Canadian winters, so De Chaunac was hoping to find some cold hardy varieties in this group that could withstand the difficult climate and still make European-style wines.  Test plots were planted and wine making trials began and by the 1960's, the hybrid grapes that showed the most potential were gaining ground in the Canadian planting statistics.  Maréchal Foch, Seyval Blanc, Verdelet, De Chaunac and Vidal Blanc were the most popular, and many of those grapes are still somewhat widely planted throughout Canada.

Vidal Blanc is perhaps best known for the ice wines created from it in many parts of Canada and the northeastern United States.  As mentioned in my post on an ice wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon in Canada, true ice wines are made from grapes that are left on the vine well after the regular harvest and allowed to freeze there.  The frozen grapes are harvested in the dead of night (to prevent their thawing) and are pressed while still frozen.  What happens when a grape freezes is that much of the water in the grape turns to ice, but most of the sugar doesn't freeze, so when you press the frozen grapes, the solid ice stays behind, but a concentrated, sugary syrup comes out.  This syrup is then partially fermented, since it is impossible to convert all of that sugar into alcohol, and the result is a rich, lusciously sweet wine.

It may seem like a simple thing to just leave some grapes on the vine and harvest the frozen juice, but not all grapes are suited to making good ice wine.  First of all, the grapes need to stay on the vine a very long time, and as grapes hang on the vine and ripen, they tend to lose their acidity.  Acidity is key in sweet wines, though, since without it, wines just taste syrupy and cloyingly sweet.  Secondly, the longer grapes hang on the vine, the greater the chance that they can be damaged either by diseases such as molds or mildews, by insects or birds, or just from the wind and weather.  Thick grape skins help protect grapes while they are waiting for the first freeze to arrive, so while thin-skinned varieties like Semillon are valued for the production of botrytised sweet wines (since their thin skins allow the botrytis to more easily infect the grapes), thick skinned varieties are preferred for the production of ice wines.  Vidal Blanc happens to have thick skins and relatively high acidity, which makes it an ideal grape for ice wine production.

When I visited the Finger Lakes region of New York a year or so ago, I picked up a bottle of the 2009 Vidal Ice from Standing Stone Vineyards for about $25 for a half bottle.  This is not a true ice wine, since the grapes were picked and then later frozen before ultimately being pressed.  In the glass it was a light tawny gold color.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of honey, dried apricot, quince, baked apple and pineapple.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity.  It was lusciously sweet with flavors of honey, apricot, baked pineapple, and orange creme with a bright, zippy vein of tart green apple running through it.  It was dense and rich, but it was also lively and snappy thanks to the fresh acidity.  I found it really well balanced and enjoyed it an awful lot.  I've bought Vidal Blanc based ice wines from Canada before and have paid almost $100 for half bottles of some of them, so at only $25 per half bottle, this is a tremendous value.

In his Wines of Canada (which I've used extensively throughout this post), John Schreiner gives the following quote about Vidal Blanc from the CEO of the Canadian wine powerhouse Vincor, Donald Triggs: "Vidal is in that magical area of not making a really great table wine but a phenomenal Icewine."  While Canada tends to focus on making ice wine from their Vidal grapes, most American producers make dry table wines from theirs, and I was able to pick up a few local examples recently and test whether Triggs' assessment of its potential as a table wine grape was accurate or not.

The first bottle that I tried was the 2010 Vidal Blanc from Running Brook Vineyards in North Darthmouth, Massachusetts, which set me back about $13.   Running Brook was founded by Pedro Teixeira and Manuel Morais, both of whom spent much of their separate childhoods in the Azores islands of Portugal.  Manuel started his first vineyard in 1975 and was one of the first people to grow grapes commercially in New England.  Pedro was actually his dentist and the two quickly realized that they both shared a passion for the vine and wine and decided to go into business together.  They opened Running Brook Vineyards in 1998, according to their website, though their labels say "Est. 2000."

In the glass, this wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was moderately intense with pear, banana, grapefruit and honeysuckle flower aromas.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity.  It was medium sweet with flavors of honeyed pink grapefruit, poached pear, candied pineapple and coconut.  The image that sprang to mind while drinking this wine was a Dole fruit cup, meaning it was fruity and sweet with a variety of flavors going on, but was still kind of flat and ultimately not that exciting.  Fans of simple, sweet white wines will find a lot to like here, especially for the price, but it's not really my thing.

The second wine that I tried was the 2009 Travessia Vidal Blanc, which I picked up for about $10 (not at the winery, but rather at the Bin Ends discount store in Braintree...the 2011 Vidal Blanc seems to cost about $15 at the winery itself).  Travessia is an "urban winery" located in downtown New Bedford, Massachusetts, which is owned by Marco Montez, who also makes all the wine.  Marco doesn't own any vineyards, but rather he buys most of his grapes from Running Brook and from Westport Rivers in Massachusetts.  He does make wine from California and from Washington St. grapes, but he insists that his wines labeled as being from Massachusetts are made with 100% Massachusetts fruit.

In the glass, this wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was reserved with reserved aromas of honey, pineapple and peach.  On the palate, the wine was medium bodied with high acidity.  It tasted off-dry with flavors of green apple, under-ripe pineapple and lime with just a touch of peachiness.  It was somewhat tart with sharp acidity, but I found that I preferred this to the flatter Running Brook wine.  Both were somewhat Riesling-like, but the Running Brook was definitely broader and more generous, while the Travessia was leaner, sharper and more austere.  To some extent, this could be a vintage issue, since 2010 was very hot in Massachusetts, and many wineries found themselves with very ripe grapes.  2009 was a more typical, cooler year, so the grapes probably weren't quite as ripe as in 2010, and as a result, the acidity is a bit higher and the fruits aren't quite as generous.  Whatever the reason, this wine is a great value at only $10, and would still be a good value at $15 as well.

*These statistics are taken from Wine Grapes, which indicates that New York has substantial plantings, but gives no acreage for them.  I haven't been able to find any specific numbers for New York myself, since most sources online only list the top 5 or so hybrid grapes grown in New York, and Vidal apparently doesn't crack that list.  Further, New York seems to measure things in terms of tons of grapes processed rather than acres under vine, so even if I could find a number for Vidal, I'm not sure how enlightening it would actually be.

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.

Verdelho - Madeira, Portugal; Canary Islands, Spain & California, USA

Several months ago, I wrote a post about the Sercial grape, in which I indicated that  I was planning a series of posts that would deal with the major grapes used in the production of Madeira.  That project is taking longer than I would have liked, but today I'd like to continue it with a look at another of the "classic" Madeira grapes, Verdelho.  In my Sercial post, I briefly outlined the history of Madeira wine, and readers interested in that topic are advised to read through that post, as today I'm more interested in taking a look at what makes Madeira different from other wines, and to do that we need to take a closer look at how it is made.

Before it was the name of a wine, Madeira was the name of a place, namely an island group about 600 miles west of Portugal.  It was one of the last stops for European ships on their way to the Americas, and many of them stocked up on the wines of the islands before setting off on their journeys.  In the early days, the wines made on the Madeira Islands were ordinary table wines, but it was found that they spoiled very quickly on board the ships, as they were stored in large barrels and exposed to the elements, particularly the sun, which deteriorated them rapidly.  Eventually it was found that adding brandy to the wines helped them last longer while on board traveling ships, but even these fortified wines eventually cooked in the merciless sun in the middle of the ocean.  While the resulting product was very different from everyday wine, it was found that it picked up some new and interesting flavors not found in any other wines, and many people began to develop a taste for it.  In particular, the US Colonies were very fond of these wines from Madeira and became a large export market for them.

Up until the early 20th Century, some Madeira houses still put barrels of wine on ships in order to properly age them, but virtually no one does that anymore.  Today, there are basically two different methods used to properly age Madeira: estafugem and canteiro.  Estafugem is the quick and dirty method where the wine is placed in large stainless steel vats that are heated either via a hot water jacket on the outside of the tank or by immersing a heating coil in the wine itself.  The vats are sealed, but not filled to capacity and are usually agitated in some way to aid oxidation as well.  The heat is applied for about three months before being bottled.  This method is fast and cheap and is used for the production of low-quality Madeiras, as the secondary flavor characteristics prized by Madeira enthusiasts are at best only hinted at using this method.

The canteiro method is the one preferred for the production of higher quality Madeiras, especially for vintage or varietal Madeiras.  Here, the wines are placed in wooden casks that can vary from 300 to 2500 litres, and the casks are placed in a warm place.  Many lodges place them in lofts or in areas as high as possible (since heat rises, after all), though others just place them outside in the sun.  The casks are typically left alone for at least two years, and the wines made in the canteiro style cannot be sold until at least three years from the January 1st following the harvest.  The casks are not topped up, and most barrels lose about 5% of their liquid each year due to evaporation.  Basic Madeiras sold with the name of one of the four "noble" Madeira grapes, Sercial, Bual, Verdelho or Malmsey, usually go through this process, while vintage Madeiras are typically aged for much, much longer.

As mentioned above, Verdelho is one of the four noble Madeira grapes.  Each of the four noble grapes maps roughly on to a particular style of Madeira with Sercial being the driest, Verdelho the next driest, Bual a little sweeter and Malmsey the sweetest.  The Verdelho of Madeira is not the same as the Verdelho of mainland Portugal, which is now known as Gouveio (or Godello, in Spain).  The Madeira Verdelho is also widely grown in the Azores, and it is thought that vines from the Azores were brought to Australia in the 19th Century.  Verdelho is still relatively widely planted throughout Australia, to the extent that the Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show does not consider Verdelho to be an alternative variety and will not consider entries made from it.  I must admit that I came across more examples of wine made from the Verdelho grape than I had anticipated, but in the end decided it was still unusual enough to merit inclusion here.

The first wine that I tried was the 2005 Twisted Oak Verdelho made from grapes grown in the Silvaspoons Vineyard in Lodi, California, which I picked up from my friends over at the Gypsy Kitchen for about $16.  As mentioned in my recent post on Torrontés, the Silvaspoons Vineyard is owned and maintained by Ron Silva, who primarily grows Portuguese grape varieties there.  In the glass, this wine was a light silvery lemon color with greenish tints. The nose was fairly reserved with some green apple and lemon-lime citrus fruits along with some slighly oaky and buttery aromas as well.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly low acidity.  There were flavors of vanilla, ripe pear, buttery pie dough, ripe apple, coconut and pineapple candy.  I had half expected that the wine would be shot as it was 7 years old when I tried it, but it was drinking very well.  It's not really my style of wine, though, as the low acid and prominent oak are a deadly combination for my taste buds.  Fans of moderately oaked California Chardonnay will find a lot to like here, though, especially for the money.

The next wine that I tried was the 2007 Bodegas Viñátigo Verdello from the Ycoden Daute Isadora region on the western tip of the Tenerife island in the Canary Island chain.  I picked this wine up for around $32 from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep bronze-gold color.  The nose was fairly intense with leesy aromas of red apple, pear and honey with a little nuttiness and a little cheesy funk as well.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of toasted almonds and sawdust along with some honey, red apple, dried apple, dried apricot and baking spice.  This is a wine that really needs to be served as close to room temperature as you can manage, as it is harsh and spare when chilled too much.  As it warms up, though, the spice and dried fruits really become more apparent and the wine becomes much more generous and appealing.  It's not a cheap wine, but it is both good and interesting, which are the two major requirements I have for wines in this price range.

The final wine that I tried was the NV Vinhos Barbeito "Savannah Verdelho" from their Historic Series, which set me back about $40.  As a proud Georgia native, I was gratified to learn about the strong history of Madeira in the city of Savannah.  In addition to being a major port city for the import of Madeira wine in the early days of America, the city was (and I believe still is) the home to the Madeira Club of Savannah, a group of Madeira enthusiasts who gather monthly to drink fine old Madeiras, dine together and discuss issues of the day.  While this wine probably wouldn't be served at one of their functions, I found it plenty enjoyable.  In the glass the wine was a dark, deep tawny-brown color.  The nose was very intense with powerful roasted nut and burnt sugar aromas.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with high acid and medium sweetness.  There were zippy flavors of green apple, tasted walnuts and pecans, burnt sugar and smoke along with a slight salinity as well.  This wine was exceptionally balanced with an electric vein of acidity that really supported the sugar and nutty fruits.  This would be amazing with nutty desserts like pecan pie or baklava, but would also be nice with salty, funky cheeses as well.

Much of the discussion about the methods of producing Madeira wine is adapted from Trevor Elliott's The Wines of Madeira, which interested readers can order here.

Torrontés - Silvaspoons Vineyard, Alta Mesa, California

On this day two years ago, I decided to start this wine blog.  Throughout the two years that I've been drinking, researching and writing about unusual grapes and wines, I've learned an amazing amount and met some really nice and interesting people.  I've been humbled that people choose to read and respond to the stuff that I write here, and I've really tried to make the content on this site worthy of other people's time and attention.  The very first grape that I wrote about on this blog was Torrontés, and I wrote that post after quickly scanning the Wikipedia entry on the grape, and then banged out a few tasting notes from memory.  It's the worst researched and probably the worst written post on the site, but I can't bring myself to take it down.  I've wanted to re-write several of those early posts, but have had so many new wines to write about, that I just haven't had the chance.  Today I'd like to rectify that and am going to write a new Torrontés post from scratch, taking a look at a very interesting California Torrontés in the process.

Torrontés is the most widely planted white grape in Argentina as of 2008 and has become a bit of a minor phenomenon on the US marketplace.  It is certainly not as easy to find as Malbec, but chances are good that if your local wine shop has a white wine from Argentina, it's probably a Torrontés.  But which Torrontés?  It turns out that there are three different Torrontés cultivars grown in Argentina: Torrontés Riojano, Torrontés Sanjuanino and Torrontés Mendocino.  Each is named for a different province of Argentina, with Riojano corresponding to La Rioja (and not the Rioja in Spain), Sanjuanino corresponding to San Juan and Mendocino corresponding to Mendoza (and not the county in California).  There are also a few grapes grown in Spain with Torrontes as a synonym (most notably Albillo Mayor and the Terrantez grape of Madeira), but these Spanish Torrontes grapes are not related to the Argentine grapes.

Torrontés Riojano is the most important cultivar commercially, and, for the most part, when you buy a bottle of Argentine Torrontés this is the grape that's in your glass.  Torrontés Sanjuanino has many of the same aromatic qualities that make Torrontés Riojano so popular, but it produces lower yields than Torrontés Riojano, so growers aren't as keen to plant it.  Torrontés Mendocino lacks the explosive aroma profile of the other two Torrontés cultivars and is only really cultivated in southern Argentina, when it is grown at all.  Torrontés Riojano and Torrontés Sanjuanino are also grown to some extent in Chile where they are known as Torentel and Moscatel de Austria respectively.  At this point, you may be wondering exactly what the relationship between these three grapes actually is.  Are they different clones of a single grape or are they different grapes?  And if they're different grapes, are they actually related to one another or are the names misleading?

In 2003, two teams of scientists from Argentina and from UC Davis in California set out to discover the relationships between these three grapes (citation 1 below).  They found that each had a genetically distinct DNA profile, and were thus separate cultivars.  They also found that Torrontés Riojano and Torrontés Sanjuanino are full siblings and that both resulted from a cross between Muscat of Alexandria and Criolla Chica, which is actually the same grape as the Mission grape of California, or the Listan Negro grape of the Canary Islands (they also found a few other grapes whose parents are Muscat of Alexandria and Criolla Chica, but those grapes aren't really important here).  Torrontés Mendocino is a half-sibling of the other two Torrontés cultivars, as it has Muscat of Alexandria as one parent, but its other parent is unknown.  The authors believe that the crossings that created each of the Torrontés cultivars probably happened in South America, since there is no European grape that is a genetic match to any of them.

Torrontés is grown virtually nowhere outside of South America, but apparently grape grower Ron Silva, who usually specializes in Portuguese grapes, has planted some Torrontés in his Silvaspoons Vineyard in the Alta Mesa region of Lodi, California.  Silva mostly sells the grapes he grows to California wineries, and one of his customers is Matthew Rorick of Forlorn Hope Wines.  Forlorn Hope makes wines from a host of unusual grape varieties and is committed to minimal intervention in the winery.  Rorick uses only natural yeasts and older, neutral barrels in the winery, and if the Torrontés that I tried from him is any indication, he's not that into filtering his wines either (which is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned).

I was able to find a bottle of the 2009 Forlorn Hope "La Gitana" Torrontés from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for around $28.  In the glass this wine was a medium lemon gold color and was a little hazy.  On the nose the wine was fairly intense with aromas of honeysuckle flower, peach, pineapple, tea leaves and lime.  The perfume was gorgeous and heady and almost a shame to drink.  On the palate the wine was medium body with fairly low acid.  There were flavors of waxy pear, honeysuckle flower, peach skin, orange blossom and beeswax.  The wine was delicate and subtle, but also incredibly complex.  This wine only needs a slight chill, if you want to chill it at all, as it shuts down at very cold temperatures, but when it's in the zone, it's an amazing, beautiful wine.  Many of the Torrontés based wines from Argentina can be very short or bitter on the palate and though they are almost all very perfumy and aromatic, I find that most of them end up disappointing me when I go to actually drink them.  This wine, though, is amazing the whole way through and is easily the best Torrontés-based wine that I've ever had.  Yes, it is going to run you more than the Argentine versions, but it's worth every penny.  Production is very limited on most of the Forlorn Hope wines, but if you happen to run across this, do not hesitate to pull the trigger.

CITATION

1) Aguero, CB, Rodriguez, JG, Martinez, LE, Dangl, GS, & Meredity, CP.  2003.  Identity and parentage of Torrontés cultivars in Argentina.  American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 54(4), pp 318-321.