I Blame My Parents

by Stacy B. Brody, Rutgers Student and Enthusiastic Intern

You all know about Fox Run Vineyards, but you don’t know much about me. So I think I should fill you in a bit. I don’t have a complex or anything, I’m not going to go from my birth, day by day, hour by hour (though this is quite interesting and we really should discuss this), but I’ll give you a brief bio about me.

Occupational Hazards, Winemaker Style

When I started working at Fox Run more than a decade and a half ago, I took up with a dentist whose office was closer to my new home. After getting my records sent up from my old dentist’s office, I went in for my first exam and cleaning.

Laura, the extremely chatty hygienist, hadn’t been poking around in my mouth for more than a minute or two when she suddenly went quiet and furrowed her brow. “What do you do?” she finally asked, in a way that made it clear she wasn’t just making small talk. “Eye-ay-er,” I answered, which was the best I could manage with a gloved hand and sharp pick in my mouth. She didn’t know what I was saying.

“I look at a lot of teeth,” she said, “but I’ve never seen ones like yours.”

“Uh ake ine.”

“What? Wait a minute while I finish.”

As she continued on her hygienic way, she elaborated. “I can look in peoples’ mouths and tell a lot about their lifestyle. I can tell if they’re heavy coffee drinkers. I can tell if they’re heavy tea drinkers. Pipe smokers have distinctive teeth. So do cigar smokers, pot smokers, tobacco chewers, tooth grinders, bulimics…”

“Bulimics?”

“The backs of their teeth are always badly eroded from contact with stomach acid. Anyway, you are none of the above. So what is it you do?”

“I put small quantities of wine in my mouth all day, hold them there, and then spit them out.”

There was a long pause.

“…..Excuse me?”

Laura told me that in addition to being badly stained, my teeth showed a distinct pattern of enamel erosion, especially at the gum line, which meant that major and costly repair work was in my near future.

“I don’t believe it…that’s what my horoscope said too!” I said, mouth agape.

She glanced down at my chart. “You Capricorns. Always with your superstitions!”

Laura asked me if there were any way I could use a machine to analyze the wines I was making, so as to give my pearly whites (actually they were spongy grays) a rest. I explained that while we do perform a number of lab analyses on our wines – pH, titratable acidity, residual sugar, alcohol content and the like – no apparatus existed that could tell if a wine smelled and tasted good. Hence the need to constantly put wine samples in our mouth, ponder them awhile, and then expectorate. (I didn’t tell Laura that my lab sink and drain bore the worst brunt of all, and needed the attention of a plumber every few years.)

Some time later I took a one-month sabbatical to teach at the University of Adelaide in Australia. One morning my horoscope told me that something momentous was going to happen that day, and sure enough, I happened upon an article in a trade journal titled “Winemakers, Look After Those Teeth!” The author was a dentist based in Canberra who had evidently had enough of whiny winemakers complaining that their choppers weren’t performing up to speed. He recommended using a recently developed product called Recaldent Tooth Mousse, which has the capacity to remineralize teeth and make them more resistant to acid attack.

The stuff is expensive and has to be shipped from Australia, but it really does work. I’ve told all my bulimic friends, who number in the thousands, about this product, as well as any winemaker who happens to complain of problems with tooth erosion.

And this morning I went in for my semiannual dental exam. Laura, the forensic dentistry expert, is long gone, but the staff there know that I am what’s called a Special Needs patient, and they indulge me accordingly. “Good for you!” they coo. “The staining is not that bad today! Good for you!”


By: Peter Bell, Winemaker


Music of the Day:

• Dan Rooke; "Avenues of Forgiveness:"

What's In The Bottle: 2002 Meritage

N.B.  With this post, we are hoping to begin a periodic series that we'll loosely call "What's In The Bottle." With each post one of us will bring up a specific bottle of wine they have tried recently and discuss it with the same candor we respect in one another and our visitors at the winery.  These wines will run the gamut from Fox Run's current release wines, 'library' wines, tank/barrel samples, and perhaps even some bottles from other wineries or regions.  Not strictly a review or attempt to grade a wine, this is more about frankly relating what is in the bottle and why that is, might be, or may become.


Idiosyncratic though it might be, New Year's Day is almost certainly my favorite holiday dinner.  As opposed to the restricting traditions of Thanksgiving (give turkey a rest, people!  Better had it been made the national bird of the United States as Benjamin Franklin seemed inclined, so that we no longer forced ourselves to pretend it is delectable) and the confusion and expectations surrounding Christmas dinner (Force the turkey-issue for the second time in a month?  Ham?  Some other Roast?), New Year's Day is one that often goes overlooked due to a lack of history and the presence of College Football Bowl Games.

Without overlooking the bowl games, our family harkens back to our very-Anglo roots for this one meal of the year 'anglo' ("and go"...anyone?  Did that work?  No?  Alright, moving on then) all out.  Potatoes roasted crisp in goose fat from the Christmas goose, roasted vegetables, creamed mushrooms, yorkshire pudding, and - the crown jewel - the standing rib roast.  This is a hefty meal that goes against the New Year's resolutions that so many will be trying to follow for the next week, but if we are breaking our own at least we are doing so in a blaze of glory.  Nevertheless, once a year it is a treat and also relatively stress-free to pull together.

So what wine does one have with a meal like this?  Fortunately, the flavors are relatively pure and simple as fantastic as they are.  This means a complex wine will not be lost in the fray of flavors and can serve as a wonderful counterpoint.  While I have no compunction about grabbing a very nice bottle of wine from my cellar (I firmly believe that sitting on special bottles for the "right occasion" is the surest way to spoil the wine and limit the number of special wines you will experience), having food that begs for such a wine is certainly a bonus.  Although it far predates my start at Fox Run, I have one bottle of 2002 Meritage that I decided was ready for the opening.

2002 Meritage:

• Composition:  50% Merlot, 40% Cabernet Franc, 10% Cabernet Sauvignon
• Quantity Produced:  220 Cases, very little of which I imagine still exists.
• Neither ABV or Dryness are specified, but 12.5% ABV and zero grams residual sugar are most likely.

First things first, I was glad the wine wasn't corked.  Not that there was any reason to expect it to be, but when you only have one bottle of something that is always on your mind.  The next nagging question was how tired/old the wine would seem.  We make Meritage blend wines with an eye towards cellaring potential, and many Finger Lakes Wines are cruelly cut down before their prime, but over eight years of age on a red wine from the Finger Lakes is not entirely common.  The wine was still a dark burgundy color, however, with only the slightest signs of orange creeping in around the edges.

More importantly, it still smelled like a fresh wine.  To my nose, the wine was dominated by the merlot component of the blend with its plums and blueberries.  There was also a nice overlay of oak with the spices and vanilla on the nose, although I must be honest and say it was a tad more than I would still want to see.  My loves in aged red wines from the right years and right regions are tabacco leaf and leather, two smells that are beguiling in a wine glass even if they sound bizarre, but this wine left me unsatisfied in this regard.  That is not to say the lack of these aromas are a fault in the wine, or even that they should be there, but I certainly would like to try the Finger Lakes red that pulls it off!

Upon tasting the wine, I was pleasantly surprised with how vibrant the fruit components were in it.  Despite the large proportion of cabernet franc and sauvignon in the blend, the typical forest floor and earthy cassis flavors were not so evident as brilliant cherry and muted blueberry.  The finish continued in this vein for quite some time before turning to dark chocolate.  Structure wise I was very pleased with the tannic component of the wine, but actually found the acid a bit much through the finish (a factor contributing to the bumped up tannins).  Given that this is a red from the Finger Lakes, acid is part of the game that you have to accept from the start.  The question it causes me to wonder is how the perception of the acid in the wine has changed since it was bottled, but the balance of the wine going into the bottle is one only Peter can answer.

In the end, the wine passed the most important test of any wine with flying colors: it was enjoyed and seemed to disappear without anyone knowing how.  Given the meal we were enjoying, the slightly higher acid was absolutely a blessing in terms of the wines ability to cut through the rich foods and refresh the palate.  This is the factor that makes Finger Lakes wines of all types, when well made, some of the best food pairing wines on the planet.  And on this first day of 2011, it made for a wonderful pairing indeed (although I probably wouldn't push it to 2012).

By:  Kelby Russell, Winemaking Team

Music of the Day:

• Mel Tormé and Judy Garland; "The Christmas Song" performed live by two under appreciated vocal legends (it's still the twelve days of Christmas!):

Support Artists, buy the music you like!