Posts Tagged“frontenac”

Tasting for Terroir in Cold Climates

Harvest is closing in fast and winery tasks are in high gear, whether it be crush pad prep or the bottling of last year’s vintages. From large producers to little amateur outfits like our own, the story is the same as one season rolls quickly into the next, and what comes in through one door must pass out another and make room in between. While I was bench testing blends for the 2013 whites, I got to thinking about a very interesting and informative cold-climate tasting from earlier this summer, when it seemed like we still had all the time…

Continue Reading

Frontenac: Mutant Vintage

It was very tempting to approach this subject indirectly through a wine science fiction sort of allegory. The tale of a race decimated by plague and forced to breed with other relative species in order to survive. The social stigmas faced by the viable offspring:  the challenges of relocation and settling of new lands,  the strange and divergent characteristics that began to appear in subsequent generations. It’snot far off, as a version of the inter-specific hybrid grapevine story, and of the unexpected mutants that currently exist among us, in the form of the cold climate grape called Frontenac. The Frontenac grape…

Continue Reading

Cape Winery Sprouts in the Thousand Islands

The official opening of the Cape Winery in Cape Vincent, NY is not until Memorial Day, but a recent springtime Saturday “soft opening” saw over a hundred people in the tasting room, more than a dozen cases of wine leave the premises in the hands of happy consumers, and folks joining the infant “case club.” The current version of the New York State Wine Regions map shows expanded areas all around the state, and this latest opening already asks for those boundaries to be expanded even more. Situated on a spit of limestone-based land that has Lake Superior on one…

Continue Reading

Whitecliff Vineyard NV Red Trail

People think that I hate hybrids — but that just isn’t true. There are hybrid grapes that I think are pretty awful generally — I’m looking at you seyval blanc and traminette. But at the end of the day, if a wine tastes good, I don’t care what grape it’s made from. This wine tastes good, even if it’s a four-grape blend that includes three hybrids that I haven’t enjoyed much in the past. Whitecliff Vineyard NV Red Trail ($14) is a blend of dechaunac, frontenac, noiret and merlot — and the result is a spicy, easy-drinking red. Fresh strawberry…

Continue Reading