Marsanne - Victoria, Australia and Paso Robles, California

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Cortese grape and was promptly called out on Twitter by my friend Tom whose blog you can read here.   His good-natured charge against me was that Cortese wasn't an unusual enough grape and Gavi wasn't a Fringe enough wine for me to be writing about.  Since this is pretty much the only limiting criteria that I have for content on my site, it's a question that I take very seriously and one that I struggle with on a regular basis.  Just what grapes and wines are unusual enough to write about here?  It's pretty obvious for the most part whether a certain grape or wine is suitable for inclusion, but there are some gray areas that are difficult to navigate.  My general rule of thumb is that I try to feature wines and grapes that the average American wine drinker (not out of any kind of pro-USA chauvinism but rather out of a kind of lack of international imagination on my part) would find unusual, but "the average wine drinker" is a difficult entity to pin down.  The farther I go down the unusual wine rabbit-hole, the farther away I find myself from the "average" wine drinker and the harder it gets for me to imagine what someone labeled as such might think about a given topic.  

It's a question that I've struggled with since day one and my notebooks are littered with entries on grapes like Silvaner, Müller-Thurgau, Roussanne and Marsanne which fall right into the grey zone for me between common grapes and unusual ones.  I've obviously decided to throw caution to the wind today and write about the Marsanne grape, and there are a few things that helped to tip the scales in this particular case.  The first thing is that the two wines I'm taking a look at are pure varietal wines made from 100% Marsanne grapes.  Marsanne is generally used as a blending grape not only in its original home in the northern Rhone Valley but also in many of the new world areas where it has established itself to a limited extent.  It is usually partnered with Roussane and Viognier in the white wines of the northern Rhone, though up to 15% Marsanne is allowed in the red wines of the Hermitage region.  Some varietal wines are made from Marsanne in the Rhone Valley, but they can be difficult to find since most wines are labeled by appellation and not by grape there, and not all producers indicate the varietal breakdown on the back label.

The second thing is that neither of the wines that I'll be writing about are actually from the Rhone Valley, or France for that matter.  France has about 1200 hectares planted to Marsanne (very close, incidentally, to the 1100 that Italy has planted to Cortese), and the overwhelming majority of the plantings are in the Rhone Valley (the rest are scattered in limited quantites among Savoie, Languedoc and Provence).  Marsanne is actually the most widely planted white grape in the Hermitage region and takes up a significant amount of land in the nearby regions of Crozes-Hermitage, St. Joseph and St. Péray.  Today's wines, though, come from the new world areas of Australia and California whose vinous reputations are definitely built on the backs of other grapes.  Before getting to those wines, though, I'd like to take a closer look at the Marsanne grape itself.

As mentioned above, in its native Rhone Valley, Marsanne is typically blended with Roussanne and Viognier for white wine production.  Given the similarity in their names, I wondered whether Roussanne and Marsanne were somehow related, but apart from a few off-hand references to the grapes as "siblings," I can't find anything definitive on the matter.  I took a look at the DNA profiles on file at the VIVC database and there's an awful lot of overlap between not only Marsanne and Roussanne, but also with Viognier.  The grapes all have at least one match at each of the six loci shown which would seem to suggest some kind of relationship, but it's difficult to say exactly what the relationship might be without more data.

Marsanne is a relatively high yielding vine which has caused many growers to devote more acreage to it than to its companion Roussanne, which yields less generously and more erratically, in the northern Rhone Valley.  It is prized for its rich body and heady perfume but can suffer from a lack of acidity if grown carelessly or in excessively warm areas.  Outside of France (but still within Europe) Marsanne can be found in limited quantities in Switzerland, where it is sometimes known as Ermitage, and northeastern Spain, where it is known as Marsana.  The explosion of interest in Rhone varieties in the 1980s led to limited plantings of the grape in California as well, but it is probably in Australia where Marsanne finds its truest expression outside of the Rhone Valley.  Though there are less than 250 hectares devoted to it in Australia, some of the vines there are thought to be among the oldest Marsanne vines on earth.

Tahbilk Winery, who made the first wine I'd like to take a look at, can trace some of their Marsanne vines back as far as 1927.  I was able to find a bottle of the 2006 "Museum Release" Marsanne from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $15.  In the glass this wine was a medium greenish-gold color.  The nose was fairly intense with ripe apple, honeysuckle flower, ripe pear and nutty vanilla with a biscuitty, pastry-like aroma as well.  This wine had obviously spent some time in oak and was wearing it pretty loudly.  On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of lemon, apple and pear fruit along with some honeysuckle, creamy vanilla and pie crust.  Again, the oak was apparent, but it was much more thoroughly integrated into the flavor of the wine than into its aroma.  Despite the wine's heft on the palate and Marsanne's propensity towards flabbiness, this wine was very deft and balanced with a lovely vein of acidity that really held it together.  At $15, this wine is an absolute steal that I could see developing even more in the bottle for another decade or so.

The second wine that I tried was the 2010 Ambyth Estate Marsanne from Paso Robles California.  This wine is distributed by MBJ Wine Group, who provided me with this sample bottle gratis and with whom I do have something of a professional relationship.*  Ambyth Estate is a biodynamic producer that focuses on Rhone varieties and is committed to "natural winemaking" practices, meaning minimal intervention and, in this case, no added sulfites.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color with a bit of haze to it.  The nose was moderately intense with delicate aromas of honey, honeysuckle, peach and ripe red apples on their way towards cider.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  The flavors were also delicate and subtle with ripe apple and apricot fruits along with a touch of honeysuckle and apple cider.  The wine presented an interesting mixture of delicacy and perhaps light oxidation.  It's a lithe, nimble wine that is a very different animal than the big, oaky example from Australia above.


*I am essentially an editorial consultant with them, for which I do receive slight compensation.  I have not received any compensation for this review, however, and any opinions I express about this wine are my own honest feelings and do not necessarily represent the thoughts or opinions of MBJ Wine Group.

Vignoles - Finger Lakes, New York, USA

Generally speaking, establishing the pedigree of man-made crossings and hybrids is a pretty simple task.  The people who create these new grapes are typically working in a research laboratory environment and they tend to keep detailed notes and logs about their efforts.  Even those grape breeders who are working outside the confines of a university (like our old friend Elmer Swenson) tend to keep written records of their experiments and to meticulously track the pedigree of each grape that they create.  Pedigree reconstruction for these grapes is supposed to be an easy thing because we don't have to try and reconstruct a process of nature.  A person was not only there for the birth of a new grape, but was directly responsible for putting both of its parents together.

Despite this, it does occasionally happen that the parentage of a man-made grape comes into dispute.  A few months back we took a look at the Emerald Riesling grape, which was created by the legendary Dr. Harold Olmo at UC Davis in 1948.  Olmo's own paper announcing the release of the grape lists the grape's parentage as Muscadelle of California and White Riesling, but the Oxford Companion to Wine online edition lists the parentage as Muscadelle and Grenache.  As mentioned in my post on Emerald Riesling, the OCW declined to provide any additional details about their claim, other than to assert that the parentage given by Olmo was incorrect.  They promise that their new book on wine grapes, which will be published later this year, will provide more details and we'll just have to wait and shell out the $125 to read all about it then.

Part of the pitch for this new book from the OCW publishing crew is that they brought a grape geneticist on board who not only reviewed and incorporated some of the most up-to-date literature on grape DNA analysis, but also conducted a number of analyses himself explicitly for inclusion in this particular book.  My guess is that whatever new parentage they've uncovered for Emerald Riesling is the result of this private research.  I'm very interested to read their take in this new book and hope that these results turn out to be more viable than their assertion that Hondarrabi Zuri and Noah are the same grape.

I personally find it unlikely that Harold Olmo would be mistaken about the parentage of a grape that he created, but if he was (**UPDATE** he was), it turns out that this wouldn't be the first time that something like this has happened.  The subject of today's post, the Vignoles grape, was created in France by a private breeder named J.F. Ravat around 1930.  The grape was known as Ravat 51 until 1970 when the Finger Lakes Wine Growers Aassociation renamed it Vignoles.  The parentage of Vignoles was reported as Seibel 6905 (also sometimes known as Subereux) and Pinot de Corton.  This parentage is given in a number of different sources (Iowa St., Wikipedia, the OCW, the VIVC and the National Grape Registry, among others) with a few minor variations.  First, it turns out that there isn't any grape known as Pinot de Corton, so some assume that Pinot de Corton refers to a clone of Pinot Noir from the Corton region of Burgundy and thus report Pinot Noir as a parent rather than Pinot de Corton.  Additionally, Wikipedia reports the other parent as Seibel 8665 rather than Seibel 6905 (which is almost certainly a mistake), while the OCW simply says that the other parent is Seibel (which, as far as I know, is not a name given to any individual grape, but is rather used generally to refer to the thousands of various grapes that Albert Seibel created during his career).

The problem, it turns out, is that neither Seibel 6905 nor Pinot Noir are actually the parents of Vignoles.  In a study published in 2008 (see citation 1 below), a research team from UC Davis and Cornell University examined a number of hybrid grapes that are commonly used by the Cornell breeding program to see whether their purported parentages were accurate.  Of the 24 grapes that they examined, the given parentage was confirmed for 20.  Two of the others were the result of a vague description and one other had Gamay reported as a parent but was actually the offspring of Pinot Noir.  Vignoles was the 24th grape, and the team was able to conclusively rule out both Pinot Noir and Seibel 6905 as parents.  Unfortunately they were not able to identify the actual parents of Vignoles, so that bit of its history remains a mystery.  The research group tested two other samples of Vignoles to be sure that they didn't have an anomalous grape and both of those samples came back identical to the first sample.  They offer as a possible explanation that perhaps what is known in the US isn't actually Ravat 51, but it's hard to know how at this point how that might be tested.

Vignoles was introduced into the US in 1949 and was given the catchy moniker P17857 (or sometimes 181481).  As mentioned above, it was renamed in 1970 by the Finger Lakes Wine Growers Aassociation, though I'm not sure what led them to choose the name Vignoles.  The grape buds late, which helps it avoid early spring frosts, and has small berries with thick skins.  Despite that, the berries are not only prone to cracking, but are also very susceptible to botrytis cinerea infection in both its good and its bad forms.  It is naturally high in sugar and acid and as a result many wines made from it are either made in an off-dry style or as a late-harvest style dessert wine.  It is moderately cold hardy which has made it popular in cooler climates like the Finger Lakes region of New York.

During my vacation to that area last year, I picked up three different wines made from Vignoles, all from the same producer but each in a different style.  The first wine was the standard table wine offering from Anthony Road on Seneca Lake.  I picked this up for about $13 from the winery and tasted it at our beautiful cabin on the lake (seen in the background of the picture at right).  In the glass this wine was a medium gold color.  The nose was moderately intense with white peach, grapefruit peel and pear fruit along with a touch of something vaguely floral.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and was off-dry. There were flavors of honey, white peaches, grapefruit peel, and pineapple.  There was a touch of something bitter on the finish that was a little disconcerting, but overall this was a very nice wine, especially for the money.  It is somewhat Riesling-like in its balance of sweetness and acidity, but isn't quite as graceful as some of the best Rieslings.

The second wine that I tried was Anthony Road's "Sweet Dream," which is a late-harvest dessert style wine made from Vignoles grapes.  This wine was from the 2007 vintage and set me back about $16 for a half-bottle.  In the glass the wine was a fairly light amber-gold color.  The nose was pretty intense and pungent with pineapple, ripe peach, baked apple and orange marmalade fruits along with something that I couldn't quite identify but which smelled kind of like kerosene or like an old camping lantern.  On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity.  It was very sweet (16.2% residual sugar) and had flavors of pineapple, honey, orange marmalade and orange peel.  This wine finished with the same kind of bitterness that the table wine had, but it was more pronounced here.  Overall the wine was OK, but that assessment may have something to do with the fact that I drank it the day after the next wine that I'll be writing about, which is a wine that it had no hopes of being able to compete with.

The final wine that I tried was the 2008 "Martini-Reinhardt Selection" Vignoles Trockenbeeren, which I picked up from the winery for $75 for a half bottle.  If that price sounds extravagant, well, it kind of is.  This wine is made from grapes infected with noble rot, botrytis cinerea, which, as mentioned above, Vignoles is particularly susceptible to.  It is extraordinarily rare for grapes to be infected with noble rot in the Finger Lakes region, but in 2008, the conditions lined up just right for some of the Vignoles and Riesling vines at Anthony Road to fall victim to the fungus.  The winemaker at Anthony Road recognized what was going on and decided to make a sweet wine in the style of the great Trockenbeerenauslese wines of Germany or the Sauternes wines of France.  These wines are typically very expensive because you get very little juice from the desiccated grapes (in Sauternes it is said that an entire vine yields a single glass of wine) and because the grapes have to be monitored daily and hand picked cluster by cluster and sometimes berry by berry in order to ensure that the best grapes are being used.  It's a labor-intensive process that requires an experienced eye and a lot of extra time.

In the glass this wine was a medium amber gold color.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of marmalade, honey and stone fruit along with the same very pungent, almost kerosene like smell.  It was much stronger in this wine than in the other and may have been a by-product of the botrytis fungus itself (some of the berries for the prior wine may have picked up a little botrytis on the vine but not enough to make a wine in this particular style).  On the palate the wine was full bodied with high acidity.  It was lusciously sweet, clocking in at a whopping 26.5% residual sugar.  There were flavors of ripe peaches, orange marmalade, honey, green apple and lime curd.  In a word, this wine was extraordinary.  It was impeccably balanced with an amazing tension between the electric acidity and the rich, dense, explosively sweet fruit flavors.  It is well worth every penny of its steep price tag and if there's a better wine on earth made from Vignoles grapes, I'd be extremely surprised.

WORKS CITED

1. Bautista, J., Dangl, G.S., Yang, J., Reisch, B., & Stover, E.  2008. "Use of Genetic Markers to Assess Pedigrees of Grape Cultivars and Breeding Program Selections."  American Journal of Enology and Viticulture.  59(3).  pp 248-254.

Cabernet Sauvignon Ice Wine - Niagara Peninsula, Canada

Cabernet Sauvignon is almost certainly the most well known red wine grape on earth which ordinarily would fall well out of bounds for a site focused on unusual wines.  Part of what makes a wine unusual for me, though, is the style that it is made in, and today's wine definitely fits the bill for unusual styles.  The wine that I'd like to take a look at today is an ice wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon, which certainly isn't all that common, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to realize that wines made from Cabernet Sauvignon in general fall into a very narrow range of styles.  This is true of a lot of wine grapes, but seems to be especially true of Cabernet Sauvignon.  The range of styles available for a given wine made from a given grape are generally much wider than most people realize, but with the exception of grapes like Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, most of the great wine grapes of the world are made into a very limited number of styles.  Why might that be?.

Let's stick with the example of Cabernet Sauvignon, which tends to be made into big, powerful red wines everywhere it is grown, though the possibility certainly exists for it to be made into sparkling wine, white wine or even dessert wine.  The reason wines from this grape (and most other grapes you can think of) tend to be made in the same style all over the world is probably two-fold.  On the production side of things, Cabernet Sauvignon has been grown for centuries and over that time period, people figured out that to make Cabernet Sauvignon into the best wine possible, it really needed to be treated a certain way and made into a certain kind of wine.  You can make sparkling wine from Cabernet Sauvignon, but the best example you can make in that style is never going to be as good as the best still red wine made from those same grapes.  Grapes have certain characteristics that make them good for some application and not so good for others and, over time, producers have recognized these characteristics and have found the best ways to accent the positive while downplaying the negative.

The other part of the equation involves the consumer.  Wine makers aren't able to determine which styles of wine best fit an individual grape without some idea of who is ultimately going to be drinking the wine.  Let's imagine four different wineries putting four wines (one from each winery) made from Cabernet Sauvignon on the shelf, one as a still white wine, one as a sparkling wine, one as a fortified wine and one as a regular red wine.  If the winery making the still red wine sells out of their wine right away while the other wineries struggle to sell theirs, you can bet that by the time the next harvest rolls around, the other three wineries will devote at least some of their efforts to making a wine like the one that everybody wanted to buy.  Pretty soon all of the wineries are copying this style and the market is flooded with still red wine and few other styles for this one grape.  Consumers try wines made from the same grape but from different wineries in different regions that are all stylistically very similar, and they eventually come to identify this style with the grape itself.  The consumer then has a certain kind of expectation about a wine made from Cabernet Sauvignon and many are resistant to variations on that one style.

Which isn't to say that I think any of this is a bad thing.  The collective wisdom of centuries of wine making and wine drinking has generally not led us astray.  The great wines of the world are typically those that fit into these kinds of molds or conform to these kinds of standards.  Fortunately, though, this collective wisdom doesn't equate into dogma and even in places where the lawmakers limit the available possibilities for winemakers by dictating varieties and styles, there are ways to circumvent these regulations.  There are still winemakers who will poke at traditions and perform experiments and there are still wine drinkers who will indulge and even revel in these breaks from the norm and as long as these things continue to happen, I should have enough material to keep this blog alive for a long time.

As mentioned above, today's wine is an ice wine, which is a style that is definitely limited by a winemaker's geography.  In order for a wine to be a true ice wine, the grapes must be picked from the vine and then pressed while they are naturally frozen.  As you might imagine, this isn't possible in some of the warmer areas of the world, but maybe not for the reason you'd think.  Let's think about a hot place like Spain, where I'm pretty sure nobody is actually making ice wine.  You might think that ice wine isn't possible in Spain because it doesn't get cold enough for the grapes to freeze, but that's not necessarily true.  The temperature does drop below freezing occasionally in warm climates, but the problem with making ice wine in Spain is that by the time the climate gets cold enough to freeze, the grapes are way overripe and have probably either rotted, raisined or fallen completely off the vine.  Their growing is season is very hot, so the grapes ripen very quickly and reach their peak ripeness well before the temperature gets cold enough for them to freeze.  In places at more extreme latitudes, the growing season is less warm overall and the grapes ripen much more slowly so that by the time it gets cold enough to cause grapes to freeze, these grapes are closer to being ripe and have maintained much more of their acidity than their counterparts in warmer parts of the world.

Today's wine is from the Niagara Peninsula of Canada, which is just over the border from Buffalo, NY.  This is southern by Canadian standards and the climate here is moderated a bit by Lake Erie and Lake Ontario which border it to the south and north respectively, so while it's warmer than say the Yukon territory, it's still pretty cool by wine-growing region standards.  There is table wine production here, mostly from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, but the region's best known export is probably their ice wines.  Most ice wines are made from high-acid white grapes like Riesling or Vidal Blanc, but there are some red ice wines made as well.  I have occasionally come across some ice wines made from Cabernet Franc, but I had never seen one made from Cabernet Sauvignon grapes until this one.

The wine I tried was a 200 mL bottle of the 2006 Lakeview Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon ice wine.  I received this as a gift from a family member who was in Canada a few months back (retail on this website is around $11).  In the glass this wine was a fairly light tawny color that had a kind of purple-brown hue to it.  The nose was moderately intense and fruity with aromas of strawberry jam, figs, raisins and dried strawberries.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with very high acidity.  It was very sweet with flavors of freeze-dried strawberries, black raspberries, tart cherries, and raisins.  It was light and berryish overall with a lot of red fruits and dried fruits.  It was bright and zippy, which is an excellent quality in a wine this sweet, as it provided a very nice kind of balance.  I would imagine that these icewines are the winery's "Plan B" for those years where the growing season isn't warm enough to ripen these Cabernet grapes completely.  It's definitely a side of this grape that you don't get to see that often, and I found it very interesting and enjoyable.

Kanzler - Rheinhessen, Germany

I just spent my entire afternoon writing a post about a wine I recently tried, and right at the very end, I discovered that the grape in the wine wasn't what I had originally thought.  It's ultimately OK because the grape turns out to be Kanzler, which is also pretty unusual, but it means that the several hours of work I put into the original post is now kind of useless.

The confusion all started because the name of the wine that I tried was "The Chancellor," which both I and the shop that I bought the wine from thought was a reference to the Chancellor grape, which was going to be the subject of today's post, but will instead have to be relegated to a future post since the angle that I was trying to work was dependent on this particular wine being made from that grape.  See, Chancellor is a red berried grape, while this particular wine is white.  I remember this giving me pause while in the store, but since I've had several other white wines made from red grapes (specifically Cabernet Franc and Tempranillo), I shrugged it off.  The piece I was writing was all about the fact that the two wines that I had from this grape were made in extremely different styles, since the other Chancellor based wine that I had was a fortified, red, port-style wine.  I thought it was really cool that a single variety could be responsible for such different wines and I wrote and thought about it at some length.

As I was approaching the end of the piece, though, another nagging doubt that I had at the store began to surface again.  Today's wine is made in Germany and the Chancellor grape is a hybrid.  It has always been my understanding that the EU does not allow hybrid grapes to be used in the production of quality wines (meaning essentially wines above the level of "table wine" in all its various guises throughout the different countries).  I was never able to find specific legislation on this, but it's because the law isn't written negatively, meaning that it doesn't specifically ban wines made from hybrid grapes, but rather only allows for wines made from vinifera grapes*.  The Oxford Companion to Wine points out that there are a few exceptions for vines like Rondo, Regent, Phoenix and Orion, though, so I wasn't totally sure what the situation was with the Chancellor grape.

I decided to try to see whether the winery's website could clarify the situation, but it didn't look like the winery actually had a website.  Google searches were coming up empty until I finally found this page from what I believe is one of the distributors in the US.  On that page, whoever the author is indicates that they tasted this wine at the estate, where it was called Trivini, or "three grapes."  Since there were apparently other wines available in the US with similar names, the winery was persuaded to rename this one "The Chancellor," after the grape that comprises the bulk of it, Kanzler (the other two grapes are Riesling and Kerner).

So rather than a post about Chancellor, you're getting a post about the Kanzler grape and how I became aware of its existence just a few hours ago.  The grape itself is a German crossing that was bred at one of their research stations in a town called Alzey in 1927.  Its parents, like an awful lot of other German crossings, are Müller Thurgau and Sylvaner.  It was once somewhat popular among growers because of the high must weights that it was able to generate, which is a big deal since must weight determines the quality level of German wines.  The theory is that riper grapes have more sugar and are thus heavier than less ripe grapes, and since the Germans believe that riper grapes equal better wines, the heavier the musts, the higher your quality rating.  The biggest problem Kanzler had, though, was that it was a poor yielder, so while it gave with one hand, it took away with the other, and ultimately fell out of favor with those growers who were looking for a cash crop.  It is grown sparingly only in Germany (as far as I know) and almost exclusively in the Rheinhessen region.

Which brings us to today's wine, the 2009 Schäfer "The Chancellor," which I picked up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $11.  In the glass this wine was a medium silvery lemon color with greenish tints.  The nose was moderately aromatic with green apple and pear and a hint of grapey-ness.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of green apple and apple candy along with some pineapple and lime.  The wine was dry with a touch of something bitter on the finish.  The fruit flavors were bright and tart and overall I found this wine pretty enjoyable.  It had a bit of muscat-like grapey-ness throughout the nose and the palate that I found very appealing.  Fans of aromatic white wines with nice acidity will find a lot to like here.

*"According to regulation (EC) No. 1493/1999, article 19, paragraph 3, the production of quality wine in EU countries is only allowed from varieties which belong to the species Vitis vinifera." (source)

Torbato - Alghero, Sardinia, Italy

It's been awhile since we visited the isolated and unique island of Sardinia in Italy.  A little over a year ago we took a look at the Monica grape grown there and took a brief look at Sardinian wine in general.  I mention in that post that Sardinia is home to a handful of unique varieties, which should make it fertile ground for me, but it can be difficult to find wines made from these grapes.  Part of it is just low production.  Though Sardinia is the second largest island in the entire Mediterranean, it only ranks 15th among Italian regions in terms of total wine production.  Further, a lot of the wines that end up on US shores are made from some of the less unique grapes grown on the island, like Carignan or Cannonau, which is just the local clone of Grenache.  I do occasionally come across something interesting, though, and today's post is focused on one of those finds.

Before we can talk about Torbato, we need to talk a little bit about the history of Sardina.  Sardinia is currently a part of Italy, but that hasn't always been the case.  While the occupational and political history of Sardinia is long and complex, there is one era of Sardinia's history that seems to have more viticultural importance than any other.  In the 15th Century, the Kingdom of Aragon, which was located in what is now southeastern Spain, successfully conquered Sardinia and brought it under rule.  In 1479, King Ferdinand II of Aragon married Isabel of Castile, who was Queen of the Kingdom of Castile and León.  This marriage essentially unified the various Kingdoms of Spain into a single political entity under a common monarch.  This meant that Sardinia was now a part of Spain, and it remained a Spanish territory until 1708, when it passed into Austrian hands.  It pinballed between various European powers until 1861, when it joined the newly formed Kingdom of Italy.

It is thought that many of the grapes currently grown on Sardinia were brought to the island at various times throughout Spanish rule.  Grenache and Carignan are both thought to be ultimately Spanish in origin, as is the Monica grape we examined previously.  Torbato is thought to share this same kind of geographical heritage, though the evidence for this seems to be mostly anecdotal rather than scientific.  I've not been able to find any studies linking Torbato to any Spanish grapes either directly or familially and most sources qualify their statements of Spanish origin with words like "purportedly" or "supposedly."  The grape does have a link to the European mainland, though, as it was once grown widely in the Roussillon region of southern France under the name Tourbat or Malvoisie de Roussillon (though it is not related to any of the other members of the Malvasia family as far as I know).  The theory of a Spanish origin for Torbato seems to rest on the fact that Roussillon was also under the rule of the Kingdom of Aragon for awhile and so the grape (along with Grenache, Carignan, Monica and others) must have been disseminated to both Sardinia and Roussillon from Aragon itself at some point.

Tourbat has been virtually eliminated from the vineyards of France today and it looked like Torbato was destined to meet the same fate a few decades back.  The problem didn't seem to be quality, but rather than the vine had some unusual characteristics that made it troublesome to maintain.  The primary problem was that the stems on the vine aren't very strong, so as the grapes ripened and got bigger and heavier, they had a tendency to fall right off the plant.  If the grapes fell off before they were fully ripe, then they weren't much use to the growers.  If the growers weren't able to retrieve the grapes from the ground soon enough, then the grapes rotted and were a total waste.  Further, the grapes themselves have a lot of fibrous material within the pulp which limits the amount of juice you can get from each berry.  This means that the juice yields from each vine are lower than for other vines.  The low yields coupled with the viticultural demands were too much for most producers and the grape headed slowly for extinction until Sardinian producer Sella & Mosca stepped in.

Recognizing that the grape was in trouble, the winery made a concerted effort to not only save their old vine plantings of Torbato but also to buttress them with new plantings.  They claim to be the only winery on earth growing Torbato and making wines from it, and they might be right.  Sella & Mosca's origin story for Torbato has it that it is ultimately from "the Aegean," which I'm assuming means Greece, and that it was taken from there to the coast of southern Spain by the Phoenicians before being taken from Spain to Sardinia by the Spanish a few hundred years down the line.  They seem to be the only ones making a claim for an ultimate Greek origin for Torbato, and they do so without giving any kind of evidence, so I'm going to take it with a fairly substantial grain of salt.  Sella & Mosca's vineyards are within the Algehro DOC which is located around the town of Alghero in the northwest corner of Sardinia.  The Alghero DOC allows a variety of different grapes, including Torbato, and merely stipulates that any wine labeled varietally must contain at least 85% of the stated variety.

Sella & Mosca offers a handful of different Torbato wines, including a sparkling Torbato, but the one that I was able to find was the 100% Torbato "Terre Bianche," which is named for the white limestone soil that the grape is planted on.  I picked up a bottle of the 2009 "Terre Bianche" from my friends at Brookline Liquor Mart for about $22.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color.  The nose was reserved with aromas of red apples, pear and pineapple fruit along with something a bit nutty and a trace of vanilla (about 30% of the juice is aged in older oak barrels for four months).  Some people say that Torbato has a characteristic smoky aroma and flavor, but I didn't really get any of that.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of lemon, green apple, ripe apple and pear fruit with a hint of toasted almonds and a chalky finish.  Overall it was tart and zippy with just a hint of oak to it, but not much.  It was a nice wine, but is difficult to justify at over $20 a bottle.  Rarity has its price, I suppose.