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!):

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New Year's Wishes

It’s 8:43 on New Year’s Eve, and the last of the fifteen-year-olds has arrived.  My twelve-year-old gratefully accepted an invitation to her friend’s home tonight, so it’s me, Elizabeth and a few of her friends here tonight.  We’ll toast midnight’s arrival with a choice of sparkling apple or grape juice.  

Don’t worry; I treated myself to some delicious wine earlier tonight.  For dinner, I roasted a chicken which was sublime in its simplicity.  It was crispy and golden brown from the butter and smashed garlic I rubbed under its skin before roasting.  In the oven, melted butter and rendered fat bathed tender little yellow potatoes I had tucked under the bird along with some sprigs of fresh thyme.  Salt and pepper completed the works.  While the house filled with intoxicating aromas, I sipped our 2007 Pinot noir and happily hummed snippets of a tune I can’t place.  

Kelby said he thought he and his family would be having beef tenderloin tonight, as that has become something of a Russell family tradition.  If we’re lucky, Kelby will post a blog explaining how he cooks the beef and what he serves with it—both in terms of side dishes and wine choices.  

Peter and I admire Kelby’s perpetual calmness, especially while he’s cooking.  On several occasions, we’ve watched him whip up a feast—hors d’oeuvres through dessert—with nary a crack in his peaceful demeanor.  It’s as though he has never contemplated the possibility that his main dish might finish cooking too far ahead of his multiple vegetable preparations, and of course, it doesn’t.  He’s as quietly passionate about marvelous food as he is about wine, and he is very generous with his cooking talents.  I’ll try to persuade him to give us his New Year’s Eve feast details.

Peter most likely had something very fresh and low on the food chain.  He’s extraordinarily adept at listening to what his body wants to eat, eating that, and nothing more.  Eating with Peter is a joyful exploration of how grains and vegetables with herbs, oils and vinegars can be simple and exotic at the same time, and how satisfying those foods can be.   

He’ll probably go to sleep before midnight.  Years ago, Peter told me that was his habit, and that he is usually the first one up on New Year’s Day.  That sounded, well, odd at first, but really nice upon reflection.  Imagine the first day of a new year, unencumbered by headaches from overindulgence in food and wine and keeping late hours.  Imagine waking up fresh and ready to tackle whatever the new day brings.  A rather great idea, don’t you think?  

I had a chance to try it for myself a few years ago.  The girls were small, and under my power then.  We toasted the new year at 8:30 and they were asleep by 9:00.  I wasn’t far behind them.  We woke up early, and went for a walk as the sun came up.  It had snowed hard during the night and the morning was muffled and still.  Unbroken snow lay all around the city; the only marks were from our boots and the sled I dragged behind me.  The girls, laughing and rosy-cheeked, took turns being pulled in the sled.  As promised, we were the only ones awake (as far as we could tell) and it felt like the whole world belonged to us.  It seemed we could feel our unseen neighbors—cozy and warm in their somnolence, they exuded a collective sleepiness that lay heavy over their houses like a woolen blanket.   It was seductive, that sleepiness, but the day belonged to my bright-eyed girls, and we were reveling in it.  

That New Year’s memory is one of my favorites.  We haven’t had another like it, though, because my girls discovered that they like to stay up late.  Veeeeerrrrry late.  

This year, we’re celebrating youth and exuberance.  Theirs, not mine.  We just went on a madcap dash to find Pop Rocks—somebody had a craving, and they were too excited to turn down.  I try to say, “Why not?” when I can.  Most stores were closed, naturally, and those that were open did not have any Pop Rocks.  The kids consoled themselves by building a fort in my living room, and playing a movie really loudly.  In a few years, this silliness will give way to sophisticated dinner parties, and we’ll celebrate that too, in its time.  

These teenagers remind me tonight of people I haven’t seen, or in some cases thought of, in over twenty years.  I wonder how they are doing, and hope their lives have turned out to be as fulfilling as mine.  

By the time you read this, December 31^st will have slipped away, and January 1^st will have quietly dawned.  

Kelby will have decorously held aloft a midnight glass of sparkling wine, and offered a toast as an ambrosial conclusion to their traditional rite.  

Peter will have slept well and risen, and greeted the day, full of renewed energy.  Perhaps he has already taken his morning walk, maybe with Max to liven up the quiet morning and to bark at all those silly people still a-bed on this first day.  

My girls and I will be among those still snoozing late into the morning.  We’ll sleep as long as the puppies will let us, and then we’ll pick up bits of fallen streamers, and wayward potato chips.  Some other New Year’s Eve, I’ll remember when my older daughter was fifteen, and she had her first New Year’s Eve party, and how they laughed all night long.  

I hope that as I’m writing this, where ever you are, and whatever form your New Year’s Eve takes, that you are surrounded by people you love, and that you are happy.  

Bonne année, meilleurs souhaits,

Tricia

Music of the Day:

• Jean Redpath, a true treasure of a performer and interpreter of traditional Scottish songs, performing live on Late Night with David Letterman (Letterman being as instantly captivated by her voice as we were):

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The Bedside Diagnostician Contemplates Curative Wrestling

I just returned from what I shall refer to as ‘a place that is not the USA’, and while there I found the time to stop in at a few tasting rooms in one of that country’s up-and-coming wine regions. This particular destination, home to a dozen and a half wineries, is closer to the equator than is the Finger Lakes, and I was hoping to taste some wines that were, if not rich and alcoholic, at least tasty and expressive.

Alas, no such luck. At one winery in particular, things got off to an especially bad start. The very first white ‘poured’ a deep bronze color. (I am stealing here from the lexicon of beer writers, who have made a bold semantic leap and given free will and animism to the liquids they scrutinize.)

While it’s fine for beers to ‘pour’ a bronze color, white wines normally prefer to ‘pour’ a pale gold color. Was I disappointed? Not really, because moments before, my niece Lydia had asked a very good question: “How exactly can you tell if a wine is bad?” I’d told her that she’d have to wait until we came across one, and then things would fall into place. I had no inkling that that moment would come so soon.

There’s nothing as satisfying as a good object lesson! Lydia now knows all she needs to know about oxidation in white wines, given that she is studying to be a mezzo-soprano. My son Justin was also along for the ride, and he too was able to see the good in this experience, since his friends often tell him that he has a filial obligation to pontificate on the wine they happen to be drinking.

The second, third and fourth wines all followed suit, and then we moved onto the reds.

These wines ‘poured’ a good enough red color, but when it came time for them to ‘taste’, they didn’t fare particularly well. Lydia’s object lesson number two came rapidly, in the form of a 2006 Pinot noir. Our server had given us a carefully worded preamble – or was it a disclaimer? – along the lines of, “This one’s not from the ripest of years, but it only costs ten units of the currency we use in this country.” I hope I’m translating that correctly.

Well, if the wine’s only problem had been a hint of under-ripeness, that would have been fine. But what we had in our glasses was a full-blown example of what’s called ‘mousiness’, a type of bacterial spoilage that gives the affected wine an indelible flavor of mouse urine. It’s an aroma, actually, but an aroma that only becomes apparent when the wine heats up in your mouth for a few seconds, so you can’t use your nose in the regular way to warn you to steer clear.

I got back home several days later, and immediately drove out to the winery to hang out with my own wines for a while, in the same way that youngsters rush up to their bedroom after a vacation to spend time with their stuffed animals. Not that I was the least bit worried, but I was nevertheless happy that all the whites ‘sample-valved’ a nice pale shimmery color, and their attendant aromas were clean and fresh.

Things can and do go wrong with wines at this time of year, though, and it is one of the most crucial tasks of winemakers to take steps to prevent mishaps. A partially filled tank of Chardonnay with the top manway left open for a few days will begin to show signs of distress, and a barrel of Pinot noir which didn’t get a little dose of sulfite can start down a microbial path that will probably not end well.  

Some wise aphorist -- or maybe it was my grandmother -- once said, “Prevention is the something something of something”, and I keep that in mind all the time. It couldn’t be more true than in the realm of winemaking. Kelby wrote in an earlier blog of the House Palate phenomenon, wherein practitioners lose the ability to spot problems in their wines because of a creeping acclimation. Avoiding a house palate is our first line of defense against the appearance of aroma and flavor defects.

We need not only to be alert to all kinds of potential problems, but also to know what to call them, how to prevent them, and in a worst-case scenario, how to cure them. And this is where we are wise to look across the sea for guidance, to that ‘formidable’ nation that is synonymous with great wine.

The charming, inscrutable language of wine spoilage in French counsels us to think of defective wines as having an ‘illness’. The names of these illnesses predate the actual understanding of their cause, and so we have a collection of maladies that sound as quaint as Ague, Consumption and Glandular Fever do to modern medical practitioners. In French wine handbooks we come across terms such as Tourne (literally, ‘a case of the sniffles’), Graisse (literally, ‘I need to go lie down in a dark room for awhile’) and Acescence (literally, ‘What the hell are we going to tell the boss, Marcel?’)

This approach to wine maladies is in keeping with the French conviction that wine is a living thing, with a heartbeat and everything, as vigorous and fecund as the head lice in a third-grade classroom. And just like insects, wines can’t talk, so we can’t count on being able to coax anything out of them verbally when something goes wrong. Neither do they have foreheads, for that matter, so even seeing if they are feverish takes a whole lot more effort than it ought to.

Flow charts and the Internet to the rescue! This French website not only helps winemakers diagnose and treat wine illnesses, but it does so with a level of aplomb worthy of France’s über-hero Jerry Lewis. Here is a prime example, which I reprint verbatim:

So there you have our lives at the moment. We’ve rolled out the practice mat and are busy getting our wrestling skills up to scratch, all the while hoping against hope that we won’t have to resort to any mecanic beating of the wines. Life is beautiful.

By: Peter Bell, Winemaker


Music of the Day:

• Jean Ferrat - "C'est Beau La Vie":

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Nature's Air Conditioning

After writing about the vineyard selection riesling last week, it is almost as if the ears of our small drum of pied de cuve fermentation were burning! That fermentation had been slowly winding its way from a massive amount of sugar towards our target mark of somewhere around 63 grams per liter. Against all expectations and signals to the contrary, however, it decided to hit that mark well ahead of schedule last Thursday.

Following the initial burst of fermentation when we first inoculated the juice in October, we only checked in on the progress of the fermentation periodically to see that everything was continuing without major problems. Compared to entire tanks that we inoculated normally this would seem like a stunning lack of oversight. Our standard fermentations normally wrap-up in one to two weeks and thus require near-daily checks on how far the fermentation has progressed so we can stop it in time for the style of wine being made.

The small drum of the riesling we decided to ferment in this manner, however, was only dropping around 3-5 grams per liter of sugar per week.  Carefully monitoring the fermentation on a day-to-day level was therefore not entire helpful and rendered useless; the changes over any 24 hour period were too small to be reliably measured.

Never having experimented with this style of fermentation before, we were under the impression that the rate of fermentation would brake even further to a near standstill over the dead of winter.  Peter and Tricia became concerned last week that the fermentation had entirely halted and the drum needed to be moved to a warmer place from our winery into our warehouse.  Nevertheless, over the previous few weeks the rate of fermentation - at least in terms of how quickly sugar was being metabolized - had held steady and perhaps even increased to 6 grams per liter per week.

On my last day of work last week I decided to check on the riesling as well, both in taste and numerically, given Peter and Tricia's concerns that the fermentation may have finally halted.  To my surprise (and Peter's as well, when I called to confirm the course of action with him), the fermentation had actually sped up in the last week and we were dead-on the sugar level we hoped to stop the wine at. As opposed to the tanks of wine back during harvest that require artificial cooling via glycol jackets to halt a fermentation, the timing of this riesling could not have been much better.

At the end of the day, I simply rolled the drum outside onto our crush pad and am letting the icy temperatures we are (sometimes) fortunate to have here in the Finger Lakes do their work.  Frankly, the only question was what to write down in our record-keeping book.  Normally we write in "Cooling On" for a tank that we are chilling; this time I just wrote down "Moved Outside."  I think it speaks for itself.

By: Kelby Russell, Winemaking Team


Music of the Day:

• Giacomo Puccini - Turandot; "Nessun Dorma" (after the version in Tricia's last post, this one comes from Aretha Franklin who performed it at the same pitch, without any rehearsal, and with 15 minutes advance notice when her friend Luciano Pavarotti was receiving an award and found himself too ill to perform):

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Christmas Eve Wishes and Excited Children

Hi there, and Merry Christmas.  

I’m writing to you from the sanctuary of my room.  

Outside, white lights are twinkling, carols are playing, a fire is burning brightly and two nearly delirious children are chanting, “Come on, Mom.  Can’t we open one?  Just one?   Mom?  Come on.  Please?  Mom?”  I hope the dresser I pushed against the door will keep them away. 

Just kidding, of course.  About the dresser, that is.  

We’re having a fantastic day, and I hope that you are as well.  In a few short hours, we’ll head over the river.  Two of my sisters are in town, one with husband and two year old little boy, Noah.   We’ll join my parents at their home where we’ll talk too loud and eat too much, and will certainly have some delicious wine to drink.

Kelby’s suggested pairing of lobster ravioli from the Ravioli Store matched with Fox Run Reserve Chardonnay sounded too tasty to pass up, so that is what we’ll be eating tonight—can’t wait.  We’ll also have some Fox Run Sparkling wine, which should pair well with the lobster because it is made from Chardonnay, and because according to immutable laws of nature, lobster and sparkling wine love each other.  

That’s all the news for today.  Sorry to be so brief, but it is a special day, and outside my barricade, two fabulous girls are waiting for me to spend it with them.  

To you and yours, from me and mine, and from all of us at Fox Run, we wish you the happiest holidays.  

Santé,

Tricia

Music of the Day:

• Giacomo Puccini - Turandot; "Nessun Dorma" (as performed by the one and only Luciano Pavarotti):

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Wine Description: Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself

The following are two verbatim wine reviews from separate publications:

First Wine:

“A full, warm and seductive wine with flavors of sweet berries, damp earth and chocolate. Another wine with loads of honest flavor.”

Second Wine:

“Color: ruby. Nose: Black cherry aromas with unattractive medicinal/rubbery overtones. Palate: better than nose – ripe though not intense fruit – minty/medicinal flavor – tannins are on the harsh side – hard to see it improving.”

Reading these descriptions, it would be easy to discern which is the better wine. Or would it? It turns out that both reviewers were tasting the exact same wine, an inexpensive Australian red, at about the same time. Notice that there is almost no overlap in the two reviews. The wildly diverging descriptions are a reflection of differences in the tasters’ perception, something that cannot be standardized from one taster to another no matter how much experience or training they have. The same wine elicited a favorable response in one taster, and a very unfavorable one in another.

Here’s another example, in this case the same sparkling wine, written up in two different wine magazines: 

“This well-integrated, perfectly aged brut is still crisp and showing hints of fresh apple, along with beeswax, citrus and gooseberry. It shows off with a gorgeous mousse, and persistent flavors that linger without cracking up.” 

“Has mature aromas and flavors and enough freshness to carry the day. Offers toast, pear and white pepper flavors that grow nicely in the mouth. Finishes with persistence.” 

Here we see that the two reviewers had some commonality in their experience with this wine: both rather liked it, and both noted its ‘developed’ character (perfectly aged/mature) and its length (persistent flavors that linger/Finishes with persistence). [Fellow linguistic pedants, please ignore the blatant tautology contained in the phrase ‘persistent flavors that linger’.]

But what’s notable is the lack of any overlap in the ‘smells like/tastes like’ terminology the two tasters used, those descriptors I’ve put in boldface. Is one taster nailing the description, while the other is just grasping at straws? Are they both just making stuff up? I would say neither is the case. Each taster ably described what he or she perceived to be the attributes of the wine, but they happened to come up with completely different words.  

We run into this phenomenon so often in the wine community that it no longer has any capacity to surprise or perturb. 

“I’m getting smoke, plum and dried herbs”, says one taster. 

“I’m getting woolly-mammoth notes,” counters another fellow, who happens to be a visiting caveman. 

The first taster could take the obnoxious route, with a response along the lines of,  “Well, if only you’d taken xyz wine course/visited the region/met the owner, you’d agree with me,” or he could just say, “Huh. Isn’t that interesting,” and leave it at that.

“Wine writing is … a series of elaborately plausible compliments paid to wines,” writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. “The real question is not whether…wine writers are big phonies but whether they are any bigger phonies than, say, book reviewers or art critics. For with those things, too, context effects are overwhelming. All description is impressionistic, and all impressions are interpretive.” 

This, by the way, encapsulates one of the three great challenges in coming up with back label text: by definition, the terms we use to describe the wine inside the bottle are wrought from the personal sensory experience of one or two people. Expecting customers to experience the wine in the same way is asking a lot, though we do it anyway. (The other two challenges: condensing a lot of thoughts into a few well-chosen, cliché-free sentences, and avoiding terms that most people won’t understand.)

This week, Tricia and I engaged in one of our regular reviews of the 2010 Rieslings in tanks (Kelby is away for a few days). Each of us smelled and tasted independently and made notes. I reproduce those notes here to show that two very qualified individuals, who also happen to have actually made the wines they are tasting, will still describe them in different ways. I also thought it would be fun to commit the notes to this blog, and then do it again in a few months’ time, to demonstrate how these suckers can evolve in the tank.

Please note that what you are about to read was not meant to be anything more than internal-memo-style jottings. Writing for an audience is an altogether different exercise. The // slash marks are our shorthand way of separating aroma notes from flavor and mouthfeel notes.

There are seven individual tanks of Riesling in the winery, whose volumes range from 55 gallons to 2500 gallons. Rieslings 3,4,5,7 and 8 have been subsumed into larger blends, so you won’t see them listed here. Here we go:

Riesling 1 

Tricia: Smoke, camphor, lime, sandalwood // Lemon, toasted marshmallow, smoke. Finish is very tropical: mango, guava, passionfruit. Mouthfeel very plush but acid keeps it lively.

Peter: A little reduced. With aeration, faint fruit cocktail and marigolds. Not opening up yet // Much better in mouth. Perhaps balanced a little too dry for this style [semi-dry]. Some phenolics.

Riesling 2 

Tricia: Lemon curd, bay leaf, roasted fennel, banana, papaya // Creamy, banana, lemon, vanilla. A little broad. Love the lime fruit. Needs a touch of acid.

Peter: Forward tree fruits, apricot, mandarin orange. Clean // Bigger mouthfeel than normal for a dry style. Very clean. Balance almost perfect. No phenolics. Long. Wants some minerality.

Riesling 6 

Tricia: Pineapple, lime, tangerine, juniper // Juicy mango and lime. Some electricity here. Mouthfeel lush. Acid nice through midpalate. A touch heavy in finish? Try touching up acid. Long tangerine finish.

Peter: Still quite yeasty. Fennel, mint, smoke. Almost no fruit yet // Tight, slatey, lime peel, archetypal Fox Run dry style. Flavors explode midpalate. 

Riesling 9

Tricia: Apricot, banana, pear // Oily shale, salt air, banana and lemon zest.

Peter: Raspberry starting to show // Very lean, tense; acid dominates and wraps around other flavors. The most austere. A little too much wood smoke.

Riesling 10

Tricia: SO₂, lemon, peach // Peach and lemon, tea. Lemon ice persists. Very long and clean.

Peter: SO₂. Very clean tree fruit – apricot and peach // Flavors build. Very soft, but acid’s almost perfect. Long. These tree fruit flavors are not typical of a dry style.

Riesling 11
Tricia: Brioche, peach, mango // Burst of tangerine, mango, raspberry. Electricity happening here – rich but also intense; bright spine of acid. Long finish of mango, lime and honey.

Peter: Germanic. Cantaloupe rind, honeydew melon, some funk // That German smell, juicy, lots of fermentation flavors. Still progressing.

Riesling 12

Tricia: Lemon, apple, ginger // Peach, honey and jasmine. Also Golden Delicious – finishes golden apple, lemon, vanilla, tea and blackberry.

Peter: Apple skin, spice, mango, papaya, a little marmalade // Apple skin, cinnamon, marmalade. Acid’s high but meets the sugar.

Kelby was not able to participate in this tasting, but you may have read his descriptions of three of these wines in Monday’s post. If you’re up to the task of cross-referencing, the wines he writes about are our numbers 12, 11 and 10 respectively. Guess what? His descriptions are different again.

- by Peter Bell, Winemaker

Music of the Day:

• Sly and the Family Stone - Greatest Hits; "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)":

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Late(r) Harvest Riesling Update

For those who remember Tricia's post on the late(r) harvest, block selected, riesling that we are making this year, I wanted to give a quick update on the progress of the wine.  This wine is a bit of a challenge to analyze given that we have never before made one in a low alcohol, higher sugar style, and thus do not have memory guideposts for how what we are sensing now will evolve down the road.  With that as forewarning, however, we hope others will share in the discovery of this wine with us as we explore how it goes in the Finger Lakes.  Here's where things stand as of last week:

• Low Alcohol, High Sugar, Standard Fermentation:  This riesling finished fermenting to the point we desired quite awhile ago, at which point we put it in a small tank outside and threw on the chilling to arrest the fermentation.  When we had hit a certain level of sugar fermented in the wine, we began regularly checking the percent alcohol to make sure we hit a provisional target somewhere between 8% and 8.5% ABV.  Our belief is that we would have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 grams per liter of sugar left in the wine left at those alcohol levels, which would hopefully be balanced out by the wine's natural acidity.  After halting the fermentation (back in early November) and then hitting the wine with sulfur to kill the yeast, we tested the sugar content and determined that our final amount in the wine was right at 63 grams per liter.  This wine is phenomenally exciting to us all at the moment; it has stayed pristine and clean, but the aromas and flavors are out of this world.  Crushed pineapple, blood orange, hyacinth, sandalwood, bergamot, and a whole range of other descriptors come to mind when we taste this to see how it is progressing.  Given the low alcohol and high sugar content of the wine, it naturally still tastes very much like juice at this stage - a reality we were expecting and prepared for.  The question will be what this becomes as the wine ages and the juiciness recedes!
• Low Alcohol, High Sugar, Pied de Cuve Fermentation: Same fruit as for the wine above, but a small amount in a stainless steel container that we decided to ferment in a decidedly more Old World style.  Rather than inoculating the juice with a substantial amount of commercial yeast and then providing the yeast with nutrients to keep it fermenting happily away, this wine was inoculating with a much smaller amount of active yeast cells by transferring several gallons of an active riesling fermentation into the juice.  The result is a fermentation that takes much longer and that we intentionally chose not to feed; resulting in a different aroma profile and mouthfeel.  Believe it or not, this wine is still fermenting and is likely a week or so away from the target sugar/alcohol level we are aiming for (given the weather this time of year, however, it means that we will simply have to take the drum outside and let it sit for the temperature to fall low enough to halt the fermentation)!  In comparing it side-by-side to the wine above, it is certainly clear to us that the fruit for the two wines was the same.  Having said that, this wine is distinct and has complex aromas that we are still unsure about.  Are they a good sign?  A bad sign?  Simply a new sign due to an unfamiliar fermentation practice for us?  That remains to be seen, but it is certainly different.  
• Dry Riesling:  From the same block of very special fruit, we decided to let a portion of the fermenting juice from the standard fermentation go all the way to dryness to see how the fruit lent itself to this style.  There is no way to get around the fact that the riesling was spectacular and, frankly, is not going to look bad in any style of wine.  Nevertheless, this dry version of the wine (which finished fermenting in mid-November, a week or so after the first wine mentioned above) is a fascinating comparison and could very likely become the Fox Run component of Tierce 2010.  The spice notes are still there, as are some of the orange fruits, but the crackling acidity and citrus profile of this dry riesling style simultaneously remind us of what we look for in Finger Lakes dry rieslings and remind us of flavors we have never associated with that style.  There is a breadth and weightiness to the fruit flavors that goes against the mineral driven and fleet style of what we usually consider a Finger Lakes dry riesling, but not in an unpleasant way.

The three wines coming from this small block of fruit that we were fortunate to be able to let hang this past autumn are distinct from one another, distinct from most anything else we have ever had in the Finger Lakes, and have only passing resemblance to riesling styles from elsewhere in winemaking world.  How will the low alcohol style progress as it ages from the beautiful, yet young/juicy, stage it is at now?  Will the pied de cuve fermentation be interesting or too interesting?  Is the dry riesling style a success or clumsy?  We were excited about starting this riesling project back during vintage, but the fact that it is spawning more questions than answers at this point makes us even more excited.

By:  Kelby Russell, Winemaking Team

Music of the Day:

• Ella Fitzgerald - Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas; "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (featuring the original, and far better, lyric of "Through the years we all will be together/if the fates allow/until then we'll have to muddle through somehow."  How the "hang  your shining star upon the highest bow" version gained popularity boggles the imagination, it is almost a non sequitur in the context of that verse and takes away from the emotional punch!):

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