Touriga Nacional - Landenberg, PA, USA

If the category "Portuguese wine grapes" ever came up on the Family Feud, I'd be willing to bet almost anything that Touriga Nacional would be the number one answer by a fairly substantial margin.  Touriga Nacional is known as the Queen of Grapes within Portugal and is that country's answer to Tempranillo or Sangiovese.  It is THE main quality grape used in the production of Port and, in more recent years, has taken on a larger role in the production of dry table wines in the Douro and Dão regions of Portugal.  While it may not be a household name right now, it is a grape that is fairly well known to experienced wine drinkers and which can be had quite easily from virtually any shop.  So why write about it here?  Because this particular bottle came from grapes grown in Pennsylvania.

Before we get to that, let's talk a little about the grape itself.  Despite Touriga's reputation as the highest quality wine grape in Portugal and despite the fact that Touriga Nacional and Portuguese wines are practically synonymous at this point, it wasn't that long ago that the grape was on the brink of extinction.  The vine is prone to poor fruit set and, when the fruit actually does set, it sets into a small number of small clusters with small berries.  This means that the wines made from these grapes are uniquely deep in color and intensely flavorful and aromatic, but it also means that the vines produce pitifully small yields, which is not a quality that growers are enamored of in the vines that they cultivate.  Despite that, by around 1900, Touriga Nacional was thought to cover over 90% of the vineyard land in the Dão.  As we've seen so many times, though, once Phylloxera came to town, everything changed.  After the scourge had decimated their vineyards, many growers decided to plant higher yielding vines that they could get more juice (and therefore more wine) from.  The vine was perilously close to disappearing in the mid 20th Century but it hung on.  Today it only accounts for about 2% of the vines of the Douro Valley and possibly up to 20% of the vines of the Dão.  Given its rising popularity on the international scene, its plantings are increasing and the vine is finding its way south through Portugal, but not all that quickly.  It is currently planted on about 3500 hectares (about 9000 acres) throughout Portugal.

The name Touriga may come from a village in the Dão called Tourigo, where the grape is thought to have originated.  The Nacional part means exactly what you'd think, and I'd be interested to find out how it got tacked on at the end.  There are a host of other Touriga grapes such as Touriga Franca, Touriga Branca and Touriga Fêmea which, as far as I can tell, aren't related to one another, but the two most widely planted are Nacional and Franca.  Touriga Franca used to be known as Touriga Francesa, which means French Touriga basically, though the grape doesn't appear to be from France.  My guess is that both grapes were thought to be from around Tourigo, but, for some reason, Touriga Franca was thought to have come from France before then, while Touriga Nacional was thought to be indigenous to the area.  The Nacional was tacked on to indicate that it was a native Portuguese grape as opposed to a grape imported from another country that happened to land near Tourigo.  As for the other two Tourigas, Branco means white, so you can guess how that it got its name, while a synonym for Touriga Fêmea (while means "female Touriga") is Touriga Brasileira, which may indicate that the locals thought there may be some kind of connection with Brazil (which was a Portuguese colony for many years).  All of that is conjecture, though, and I'd be interested to hear from anyone who may know more.

Touriga Nacional is grown outside of Portugal, but like most Portuguese wine grapes, it hasn't made a big splash anywhere outside of its home country.  There is some grown in Spain, Australia and a very little bit is grown in the United States.  The grape really seems to thrive in the intense heat and poor, rocky soils of the Douro valley, so when my sister gave me a bottle of Touriga Nacional from a winery in Pennsylvania for Christmas, I was pretty surprised.  The winery is Paradocx Vineyards and they're located in Landenberg, PA, which is in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania, very near Wilmington, Delaware.  My only prior exposure to this winery was when my wife went to a wine festival in Pennsylvania with her siblings a few years ago and came home with a paint can full of 3.5 liters of wine.  I've written on other sites about my frustration with wineries trying to grow grapes that are climactically poorly suited to their region, and while I don't necessarily want to run through that argument again, it certainly looked like this might be a prime example of that phenomenon.  It turns out that Landenberg isn't that much different from the Douro Valley in terms of latitude, but I don't know enough about the climates of the two regions to be able to say how similar or dissimilar they are (my gut tells me Portugal is hotter and drier, but I wouldn't swear to it).  I'm certain that the hills of Southern Chester County Pennsylvania aren't as steep and rocky as the vineyards of the Douro, though, so I was curious to see what the wine would be like.

As I mentioned, my sister in law gave me a bottle of the 2010 Paradocx Vineyards Touriga Nacional, which it looks like retails for about $29 on the winery's website.  In the glass the wine was a pale ruby color that looked more like Pinot Noir than Touriga Nacional.  As mentioned above, the berries of Touriga Nacional are very small which usually produces a very deeply colored wine, but I could easily see through this wine, which wasn't necessarily a promising start.  The nose was nicely aromatic with spicy, dusky red cherry and raspberry fruit with a bit of wild strawberry, tea leaves and damp earth.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity and low tannins.  There were flavors of spicy cherry and raspberry fruit with strong black tea and damp earth notes.  The more I smelled and drank this, the more concerned I was that maybe I just had Pinot Noir on the brain, but my wife confirmed most of my taste sensations.

This is kind of a hard wine to talk about.  It wasn't a bad wine as far as wines go.  If I had been served this without any idea of what it was, I would have found it quite enjoyable and probably would have guessed that it was a cool climate Pinot Noir based wine.  With no information other than the juice in the glass, I would say it was a decent wine but not necessarily something I'd rush out to buy again.  But if you consider it as an example of a wine made from Touriga Nacional grapes, it feels like the conclusion that you come to about its quality has to be radically different.  As an example of a Touriga Nacional wine, it's a very bad wine as it lacks virtually all of the characteristics that you would expect to see in a wine made from that grape.  It is light and delicate where Touriga is brawny and intense.  It is marked by low color, low tannins and red berryish fruit where Touriga is deeply colored, fiercely tannic and loaded with black fruits.

So is the wine good or bad?  What can we really say about this wine?  When we had no information, we found it enjoyable, but learning additional information about the wine has prejudiced us and caused us to think about it in a different, more negative light.  Is our first sensation of enjoyment the most important one or should our critical estimation arrived at after considering all of the important facts of the matter be privileged?  Has the additional knowledge poisoned the well, so to speak, or has it given us a deeper perspective and allowed us to see something closer to the truth?

Aligoté - Burgundy, France and California & Washington, USA

Burgundy is a land of favored sons and ugly step children, of superstars and also-rans.  There are four grapes that are grown within this area, but two of them get all of the acclaim.  For the red grapes, Pinot Noir is the unquestionable star to Gamay's second fiddle, while for the white grapes, Chardonnay is the golden boy to Aligoté's red-headed step-child.  Acclaim for Burgundian wines made from Pinot Noir or Chardonnay is widespread and the prices for the best of these wines often reach stratospheric levels.  The best wines made from Gamay or Aligoté, by contrast, are little commented on and generally will cost you less than $20.  The class distinction between the two groups is clear and almost universally recognized by critics and connoisseurs alike.

Of the two outcasts, Aligoté has it much worse than Gamay, though.  Wines made from the Gamay grape are much more widely available to consumers than wines made from Aligoté, and you are likely to find a bottle of Gamay everywhere from your local grocery store to your favorite specialty wine shop.  Furthermore, Gamay has been given its own sub-section within Burgundy, the Beaujolais region, where it is allowed to be king.  Aligoté is given only a single village, Bouzeron (in the Côte Chalonnaise), to be a star in and wines made anywhere else within the Burgundy region can carry the general Bourgogne Aligoté label only.  Since wines made from the Aligoté grape are not entitled to any AOC classification above the general Bourgogne Aligoté, those who do grow it tend to grow it on poorer sites, such as the valley floors or the tops of the hills, where the grapes are not able to ripen properly.  Since the AOC laws allow for so much more specificity in labeling wines made from Chardonnay grapes, and since specificity in Burgundy generally means  higher prices, it makes much more fiscal sense for the growers to give Chardonnay the prime spots and relegate Aligoté to the fringes.  As a result, the wines made from those Aligoté grapes can be good, but are rarely world-class, so the growers and officials feel justified in their assessment of Aligoté as a second class grape and nobody clamors to elevate its status within the region.  The Oxford Companion to Wine offers the opinion that if it were planted on the choicest sites in Burgundy, "Aligoté could produce fine dry whites with more nerve than most Chardonnays," but concludes that this isn't practical not only for the reason outlined above, but also because these days Chardonnay has more commercial clout than any other white grape by virtue of its name alone.

It's kind of interesting that Aligoté is primarily known for its second-class citizen status in Burgundy because its plantings within Burgundy account for only a tiny fraction of its plantings worldwide.  There are about 1700 hectares of Aligoté in Burgundy (compared to nearly 13,000 for Chardonnay), but worldwide there are over 45,000 hectares of land planted to the grape, making it the 22nd most planted grape in the world.  The overwhelming majority of this land is in eastern Europe, though, in places like Romania (which has over 6000 ha of land planted to Aligoté), Ukraine, Russia and Moldova.  Since we almost never see these wines on our shelves here in the States, we still tend to view Aligoté in the context of its role in Burgundy, where it is more prized as an ingredient in a Kir cocktail (together with creme de cassis) than as a white wine.

I used a couple of family metaphors above when describing how the four Burgundian grapes relate to one another, and there's a very good reason for that.  It turns out that all four grapes are related to one another in a very interesting way.  In 1999, a UC Davis research team published a paper that showed that Pinot and another grape called Gouais Blanc were the parents of an astonishing number of French grapes (Bowers, J., Boursiquot, J., This, P., Chu, K., Johansson, H., & Meredith, C. (1999). Historical Genetics: The Parentage of Chardonnay, Gamay, and Other Wine Grapes of Northeastern France. Science, 285(5433), 1562).  Among those offspring were Chardonnay, Gamay Noir and Aligoté, among a slew of others.  Meaning that those three grapes are essentially "siblings" with Pinot as the father (this study did the research to prove the mother-father relationship between the grapes).  Eagle eyed readers may note that I've only indicated Pinot as the father, rather than Pinot Noir, Blanc or Gris.  The reason is that the techniques used for these pedigree studies is unable to differentiate between clonal variants of a given cultivar.  When samples of Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris are analyzed using this technique, they all come back as identical since the lighter berried grapes are merely skin color mutations of Pinot Noir.  These studies, then, cannot say conclusively that Pinot Noir was the father of these grapes, but since it has had the longest history within the region, there's every reason to think that it is.

I was able to find and try three different wines made from the Aligoté grape.  The first was the 2009 René Cacheux et Fils Bourgogne Aligoté which I picked up for about $14.  In the glass the wine had a pale silvery lemon color.  The nose was moderately aromatic with green apple and lemon-lime citrus fruits with a kind of biscuitty, pie-dough sort of element to it.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were citrusy fruits (leaning slightly more towards lime than lemon) with creamy pear and that same biscuitty kind of flavor.  The wine finished with a nice clean, steely kind of minerality.  Of the three I tried, this was the most balanced.  Aligoté is a high-acid grape which can be difficult to tame if the fruit isn't entirely ripe.  This wine reigned the acid in nicely and had a nice core of simple fruit that was tasty and refreshing.  It's not the kind of wine that will change your life, but it is a very nice value wine at less than $15 per bottle.  I spotted this wine on the shelf at several different shops within the Boston area so it should be easily findable for those interested.

The second wine that I tried was the 2008 Jed Steele "Shooting Star" Aligoté, which is vinified in California from fruit grown in Washington state.  Retail on this bottle was also about $14.  In the glass the wine was a silvery lemon color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with lemon citrus and grapefruit along with a leesy, cheesy, buttermilk kind of aroma.  Oz Clarke, in his Grapes and Vines, does say that Aligoté can have a kind of buttermilk tang to it, and once you read that sentence, you'll swear you smell and taste it in almost every Aligoté you ever come across.  On the palate the wine was light bodied with screamingly high acidity.  There were lemon, green apple and under-ripe pineapple fruits with a touch of coconut with a sour, really funky cheesy aspect to it.  I have in my notes that this was "like battery acid and bad cheese," and even sitting here writing this note I'm wincing from the memory of this wine.  I do love high acid whites, but this was tooth-strippingly acidic with a bit too much funk for my tastes.  It was a struggle not only to finish the bottle, but even to finish each glass and is not the kind of thing I'd recommend to anyone.

The third wine that I tried was from one of my favorite producers, Calera, located on Mt. Harlan in California.  Ever since I read the book The Heartbreak Grape, which profiles owner and winemaker Josh Jensen, I've been following this estate with great interest.  Their Pinot Noirs are fantastic and are among some of my all time favorite wines.  This Aligoté is made from estate fruit that is grown on only 3 acres of land.  The wine is aged for six months in older oak barrels and undergoes 100% malolactic fermentation.   They made only 116 cases of this wine in 2009, and I picked this bottle up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $23.  In the glass the wine had a lemon gold color with some greenish tints.  The nose was reserved with ripe apple and pineapple fruit and subtle leesy kind of aroma that smelled a little like buttermilk.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity.  There were flavors of ripe baked apples and creamy pear with some pastry dough and dairy-ish (buttermilk again?) notes as well.  This was a very good wine that I really enjoyed, but I would have liked to see a bit more acid in it.  In reviewing the 2010 batch of wines, Robert Parker remarked "Calera has once again made the finest Aligoté in America."  It's certainly the best American Aligoté that I've tasted, but for my money, the Burgundian example was the real winner, especially at almost $10 less than this example.  I did really like this wine, though, and have actually turned the label into a coaster for my end table at home.

Delaware - Finger Lakes, New York, USA

I'm betting that if I asked you where the Delaware grape is from, and if I forced you to hazard a guess, you'd probably say the state of Delaware.  There's a pretty good chance that some of you who have heard of the grape before have just assumed that it's named for the US state (which is itself named for Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr) and not given it a second thought.  That's certainly the conclusion that I naturally jumped to the first time I read about it, and it makes a certain kind of intuitive sense.  Ah, but our intuitions can be dangerous things that often lead us down the road of misinformation, and in this case, would definitely lead us astray if we relied only on them.  No, the Delaware grape is not named for the state of Delaware, but rather for the town of Delaware, located in the state of Ohio.

Why Delaware, Ohio?  Because that's where the grape is from, you might guess.  But, no, the Delaware grape is thought to have originated from the garden of one Paul Provost in Frenchtown, New Jersey.  The story goes that in the early 1800's, a Mr. Warford brought the grapes from New Jersey to Ohio and planted them in his own garden.  At some point, a Mr. Heath also got his hands on cuttings of the grape and both farmers were growing it in 1849 when Abram Thompson, who was editor of the local newspaper in Delaware, Ohio, became aware of it and decided to try to figure out what it was and where it came from.  In 1851 he brought the grape to the attention of the Ohio Pomological Society whose investigations into the grape's origins led them back to Provost's farm, but Provost had passed away in the interim, taking the story of how he acquired the grape with him.  Some claimed that it was brought over by one of Provost's brothers who was living in Italy, which caused the grape to be known as the "Italian wine grape" for awhile.  Others believed the grape came from a German who had spent some time with John Hare Powell in Philadelphia who was an agriculturist as well as a state senator.  Some believed that the German had brought the grape with him from Germany while others believed he picked it up from Powell on his travels.  At the end of the day, though, none of the theories had any evidence to support them, and Occam's Razor ultimately came into effect.  If we can trace the grape back to Provost's farm and no further, it stands to reason that it originated there as a spontaneous field crossing that was grown from seed.

When Thompson first came across the grape, it was generally referred to either as Powell or Heath by the locals.  Thompson sent some of the grapes to AJ Downing, editor of The Horticulturist magazine, who dubbed it Delaware since the samples he received were from the town of Delaware, Ohio.  The grape was added to the American Pomological Society's grape list as a "new variety which promises well."  Two years later it was included in their list of recommended varieties.  The grape was a sensation and was the subject of several articles in the horticultural journals of the time which delighted in debates over its origins and its parentage.  People were so pleased with the quality of wine made from the grape that many thought it must be a 100% vinifera plant at first, but this theory was quickly abandoned.  Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet, one of the leading French horticulturists of the time, believed that the grape was likely a hybrid with vinifera, labrusca, cinerea, and aestivalis in its background.  TV Munson, the Texas horitculturist and grape breeder, believed that it was a hybrid of labrusca and bourquiniana grapes with a bit of vinifera thrown in as well.  He further believed that one of the parents was likely a grape called Elsingburgh which was from an area not far from Frenchtown, NJ.  Today, the VIVC indicates that Delaware was likely the result of a vinifera vine crossed with a labrusca x aestivalis hybrid, but no specific grape names are given.

All of the information above is from The Grapes of New York published in 1908 (which you can read in its entirety here).  The section on Delaware begins:

"Delaware is the American grape par excellence. Its introduction raised the standard of quality in our viticulture to that of the Old World, for there is no variety of Vitis vinifera more richly or more delicately flavored or with a more agreeable aroma than the Delaware. This variety is rightly used wherever American grapes are grown as the standard whereby to gauge the quality of other grapes."

The grape was prized for its "constitution which enables it to withstand climatic conditions to which all but the most hardy varieties will succumb, and so elastic as to adapt it to many soils and conditions, and to bear under most situations an abundant crop."  It was considered second only to the Concord grape in terms of its quality as a grape for home gardeners, as a table grape and as a wine grape.  Today, though, Delaware is not held in nearly such high esteem (though it is called "one of the highest quality American varieties for white wine" in an Iowa State horticulture program publication, which is a bit like being called the most beautiful pig at the slaughterhouse).  It is very cold hardy but is also susceptible to a large number of diseases that make it less desirable than some of the newer hybrids.  It is still grown in the Midwest and in some of the cooler regions of New York and used to make wine there, though it is probably most popular in Japan where it is used as a table grape.  

During my trip to the Finger Lakes region of New York a few months back I was able to pick up two bottles made from the Delaware grape from the same producer but in two different styles.  The first wine was the 2009 "Long Stem Pink," a semi-sweet rosé  from Lakewood Vineyards on Seneca Lake which set me back about $8 at the winery.  The Delaware grape has pink skins, as you can see from the photo above, which can impart a pinkish hue to the wine if left in contact with the juice for a short time after pressing.  In the glass, the wine was an orangey salmon pink kind of color.  The nose was moderately aromatic with a simple, one-note grapey kind of aroma.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and a sweetness level somewhere north of off-dry but not quite medium sweet.  There were flavors of candied apples, strawberries and wild grapes.  There was a slight bitter edge to it on the finish, but overall it was simple, sweet and fruity which is generally all these kinds of wines aspire to be.  I drank this with a cheddar and chipotle sauced pasta with sausage and broccoli and it performed admirably against the spice and fat of the dish.  If you like sweet table wines with those grapey, "foxy" aromas and flavors, you'll like this a lot, probably, but if you despise and revile those kinds of wines on principle you're probably better off giving this one a pass.

The second wine that I tried was the 2008 "Glaciovinum" from Lakewood Vineyards, which is an ice wine made from Delaware grapes.  It comes in half bottles (375 mL) and costs about $16 at the winery.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep gold color.  The nose was very aromatic with honey and grapefruit that turns towards those characteristic grapey notes as the wine warms up.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and a very high sweetness level.  There were flavors of honey, ripe grapefruit, apple pie and mandarin oranges when I served the wine right out of the refrigerator.  As the wine warmed up a bit, the grapey labrusca flavors showed up though they never really took over.  Temperature was the key as the second glass I poured myself from the open bottle right out of the fridge showed the same kind of progression.  I was pretty impressed with this wine overall. I thought it was fairly well balanced and had enough going on to keep me interested in it.  The price is what ultimately enticed me into buying a bottle for myself as it can be very difficult to find ice wines for less than $20.  While I probably wouldn't buy the rosé again, I would definitely give this wine another try if I ran across it somewhere for around this price.  I think this wine's labrusca flavors are muted enough that even seasoned labrusca haters might find something to like here.

Marechal Foch - Finger Lakes, New York

I'll confess that I have a bit of a soft spot for hybrid grapes.  That's not the kind of admission that you can make in certain company, as the common consensus on hybrid grapes and the wine produced from them is that they are mostly forgettable curiosities made in places where people probably shouldn't bother trying to grow grapes at all.  But that's part of their charm for me.  I love that they allow people in unpleasant (or sometimes downright hostile) climates to grow grapes and make wine.  Sure, you can argue that these wines aren't ever going to blow your mind, but you can also say that about 99% of the wine being made today anyway.  Not every wine has to be  amazing, after all, and if a wine can't be amazing, then I'd prefer that it at least be interesting.  What I like about the hybrids is that even when the wine itself isn't all that interesting (and let's be honest, a lot of it really isn't), there's still a story behind it and how it came into existence.  I realize that that kind of thing may excite me more than most, but I've learned to live with it.

Marechal Foch belongs to a group of grapes that are informally referred to as the French Hybrids. We've taken a look at a few of these hybrids and I've written fairly extensively about their history in my post on the Chambourcin grape, which interested readers are invited to peruse at their leisure.  For those who are fanatical about the proper placement of diacritical marks, I do realize that the grape's proper French spelling is technically Maréchal Foch, but since the French have decided that they're too good for hybrid grapes, I've decided that the Americanized spelling is good enough for me.

Maréchal is the French word for "marshal" and the grape is named for a French general named Ferdinand Foch who was named Maréchal de France in 1918.  Foch was also the Allied Supreme Commander in charge of all French, British and American armies in France during World War I.  He was heavily involved in creating the armistice treaty that ended that war, though he was prescient enough to say at the time "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years."  Foch himself didn't have anything to do with the creation of the grape that now bears his name. It was created in Alsace which, those of you who are up on your geography know, is located right on the border between France and Germany.  Alsace has gone back and forth between the two countries several times.  It was annexed by Germany in 1871 but France got it back after World War I (and later lost it prior to WWII, regaining it again after that war).  The grape's creator, Eugene Kuhlmann, named it for the great French general as an homage.

Unusually for a hybrid grape, Marechal Foch's parentage isn't precisely known.  Most hybrids are created in laboratory type conditions, so there is usually a lot of documentation for them, but, perhaps because of the precarious location of Alsace through World War II, the documentation for Marechal Foch isn't complete.  Some believe that it is a product of a grape called Goldriesling (itself a cross between Riesling and Courtillier Musqué) and an unidentified vine that was itself a crossing between a v. riparia and a v. rupestris vine.  Others believe that it is the offspring of Pinot Noir and a hybrid called Oberlin 595.  Whatever the case, the grape was commercially introduced in France in 1920 and in the US in 1951, having come over from Canada.  The vine yields small bunches of small grapes which are apparently virtually irresistible to birds.  It is grown to some extent in the Loire Valley, though those grapes cannot legally be used for any commercial wine production.  It does bud early and ripen fairly late, which you would think would make it unpopular in colder regions, but it is grown fairly successfully in Canada and in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

I picked up two wines made from the Marechal Foch grape while traveling in the Finger Lakes a few months back.  The first wine that I picked up was from the Prejean Winery on the western shore of Seneca Lake.  I bought their 2008 vintage Marechal Foch for about $12.  In the glass the wine was an inky, opaque black color with a very narrow purple rim.  The nose was moderately aromatic with juicy blackberry and blueberry fruit along with some smoky charcoal and chocolate and a touch of something meaty and savory.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and very low tannins.  There were flavors of tart cherry, cranberry and blackberry fruit with a touch of smoke and bittersweet chocolate.  The wine was really tart which was surprising given how rich and dark the nose was.  I've noticed with quite a few of these hybrid grape wines that I find their aromatics very appealing, but ultimately find the wines themselves to be sour and a little thin.  This wine definitely followed that pattern.  I have in my notes that this was "all treble and no bass" and that seems like a pretty succinct summary of it.  Even at a paltry $12, there isn't a lot in this wine to recommend it.

The second wine that I picked up was from Atwater Estates on the eastern shore of Seneca Lake.  I bought their 2008 Maréchal Foch, French spelling and all, at the winery for about $24.  In the glass the wine was a deep, inky purple ruby color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with blackberry, black plum and black cherry fruit. There was a distinct meaty, gamy aroma that was really interesting.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and soft tannins.  There were cherry and black plum fruit flavors with smoky, leather undertones.  There was a slightly tart, slightly bitter cherry pit kind of finish to it.  This wine was much deeper and darker than the Prejean and much more balanced overall.  The plush fruits were nicely balanced by the smoky, leathery earthy components.  The bitter finish was a bit too noticeable for my tastes, but overall I really enjoyed this wine.  It's a little expensive for what it is, but it was the best varietal Marechal Foch that I had while I was in the Finger Lakes.  This winery's tasting room is also a pleasure to visit and the pourer was funny and engaging.  It's definitely one of those places and those wines that I'll definitely revisit when I come back to that region.

Counoise - Vin de Pays du Gard, France and Lake County, California

Counoise is one of those grapes that you may have already had, though  you might not be aware of it.  It finds its way into wines in such small proportions that not only would the winemaker probably not bother to mention its inclusion on the wine's label, but even if they did, it would have been nearly impossible to really  get a sense for what the grape tastes like.  It is perhaps best known in the Châteauneuf-du-Pape region of France, where it is one of the thirteen varieties allowed in the region's red wines.  Many Châteauneuf-du-Pape producers don't give any indication on their bottles what grapes and proportions are used in their wines, though, so it may be hard for one to say definitively whether there's any Counoise in a given bottle.  Château Beaucastel is a famous exception as they are well known for using all thirteen varieties in their wine and, according to their website, their final blend typically contains about 10% Counoise.  On the whole, though, the chances of a little Counoise ending up in your average Châteauneuf-du-Pape bottle aren't all that good.  Less than 1% of the total vineyard area of Châteauneuf-du-Pape is planted to the Counoise grape.  Counoise can also be found throughout some of the other regions of Southern France like Languedoc-Roussillon, but not in any significant numbers.  In 2000, there were only about 1500 acres (about 640 hectares) planted to the grape in all of France.

Exactly where the grape ultimately came from isn't known, but there is a story that the grape may have come come into France via Spain.  The story goes that a papal office made an offering of the grape to Pope Urban V during the period of time (the 14th Century) that the papacy was located in Avignon (whence Châteuneuf-du-Pape, or "the Pope's new castle," gets its name).  The grape was spread throughout the region and used primarily as a blending grape until the late 19th Century when the Château la Nerthe estate began to use it more heavily.  Their example wasn't followed by other producers, though, until Beaucastel decided to increase its presence in their blend.

It has never been a star in Châteauneuf-du-Pape (or anywhere, really), for a variety of reasons.  The main reason is that it is only an average yielder so it never really caught on in the more productive regions of southern France in the way that Carignan did.  Further, wine made from the grape oxidizes easily and lacks tannic structure, so it isn't really well suited to lengthy bottle aging.  Since many Chateauneuf-du-Pape bottlings are made to undergo serious cellar time, extensive reliance on high doses of Counoise isn't really feasible.  It does, however, provide nice acidity and a peppery kind of flavor that blends well with Grenache and Syrah, which has probably helped to keep it around in the Châteauneuf-du-Pape vineyards.

I was able to try two wines made predominantly from the Counoise grape.  The first was the Domaine Monpertuis "Vignoble de la Ramiere" which I picked up locally for about $12.  This estate is located within Châteauneuf-du-Pape, though the vineyard that these grapes come from must not be.  It would be legal to bottle a 100% Counoise under the Châteuneuf-du-Pape AOC, but this wine is labeled as a vin de pays, which makes me think that it must fall somewhere outside the boundary.  In the glass the winew as a medium purple-ruby color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with wild strawberry and raspberry fruit along with some tea leaves and a kind of damp leafiness.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity and medium tannins.  There were flavors of wild strawberry and stewed red berries along with some leather, wet leaves and chocolate.  The wine was very berryish with an interesting leafy earthiness to it.  It actually reminded me quite a bit of the Mencia grape from Spain.  To go a little more mainstream, it was somewhere between a Loire Valley Cabernet Franc and a light Oregon Pinot Noir.  Those looking for solid, red-berry fruit dominant red wines would be well-served checking this out as it represents a very nice value for only $12.

The second wine that I tried was the 2007 Jed Steele "Writer's Block" Counoise from Lake County, California.  I picked this up over the Christmas holidays near my mother's home in South Carolina for about $17.  There are a handful of California winemakers messing around with the Counoise grape and Jed Steele is one of them.  This wine is about 90% Counoise with the remaining 10% coming from Grenache and Syrah grapes.  The grapes come from a small parcel within the Jacobsen Vineyard owned by the Jed Steele estate.  Those interested in the finer details of the wine-making process for this bottle are directed to the winery's website here.  In the glass the wine was a fairly light ruby color.  The nose was nicely aromatic with briary, brambly raspberry and blackberry fruit fruits with some black cherry and leather.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acid and fairly low tannins.  There were flavors of black cherry and blackberry fruit with some charcoal, smoke, baking chocolate and cola.  There was a bit of wild strawberry and spicy black pepper, but overall, the flavor profile on this wine was a bit darker than the French version, though it still had a wild, berryish kind of appeal.  I found this version much more deep and interesting and felt that it definitely was worth the extra $5.