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Posts Written OnMarch 11, 2014

Red Tail Ridge Winery 2011 Blaufrankisch

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It’s extremely rare to find wines that taste exactly the same year-to-year in New York State. And that’s okay. Vintage variation is just part of the package. Not tasting the same isn’t the same as wines not being delicious every year. Winemakers on the East Coast understand what they need to do in cooler years versus the warmer ones. Harvest decisions change. Winery decisions change too. Red Tail Ridge makes some of the best blaufrankisch in New York — and not just in warmer years like 2010 (that was a great wine, though). Though in different ways, I liked the…

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Frontenac: Mutant Vintage

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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…

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