In the Vineyard with Eric Miller of Chaddsford Winery
By Roger Morris
There is an old cliché that says, “Wines are made in the vineyard.” Even though it is a cliché, every winemaker, including Eric Miller, co-owner and winemaker at Chaddsford Winery and a 30-plus-years veteran of winemaking and grape-growing, repeats the cliché and firmly believes it. Recently, Miller and I sat in the Kennett Square Starbucks discussing grape growing over a cappuccino and crumb cake.
“The vineyard is a strong signature of what your wine will become,” Miller says as he takes a sip of coffee, dressed in walking shorts as he usually is on hot days. “You have an idea of what you want in the winery and try to make it in the vineyard.”
Being a vineyardist is pretty much year-around work, but it begins in earnest in late winter and early spring, when much of last year’s new growth is pruned away the way gardeners trim limbs from a butterfly bush, except more thought is put into it. Most of the year’s work ends with harvest.
Miller moved to this area from New York’s Hudson River Valley in the early 1980s to start up a new winery – Chaddsford, beside Route 1 – but he and his wife Lee had to find sources of grapes, as they had no vineyard at the time. “I told the farmers, ‘Do what you did last summer,’” he says, “and it took me a few years to get the confidence to start making changes in what they were doing.” Those farmers who still sell grapes to Miller may find such a hands-off policy on his part hard to believe.
When the Millers bought an existing vineyard on a hillside a few miles south of Pottstown to use as their estate vineyard, Eric began a series of changes to improve the quality of the grapes. The first was moving where bunches of grapes hang – from a high cordon to a lower one. “I had just gotten back from Burgundy, where they hung lower,” he says, but there were other reasons.
Most of what happens in a vineyard is to make grapes have more flavor intensity, to remain disease-free and to properly ripen. Having fewer grape clusters, as a rule of thumb, is supposed to drive more intensity into the remaining grapes. That can be done by removing buds during pruning, later removing flowers, and by cutting away bunches of grapes – called green harvesting – during the summer.
Cutting away excess foliage, either by hedging (trimming the vines to look like rows of hedges) or by leaf plucking, decreases vine vigor, exposes the grapes to more sunlight (on either or both sides) for better and more uniform ripening and discourages mildew and rot by let air flow through more easily to dry the grapes.
When grapes are picked is of ultimate importance, because a winemaker is looking for the maximum balance of fruit sugars (that turn into alcohol), grape flavors, acidity, pH and tannins. Green seeds or pips can give the wine bitter tannins.
But before all this happens, Miller explains, you need to select the right grape variety – and its proper clone and rootstock – to plant according to the terroir (soil and climate). This is something that Europe has had centuries to decide, but local winemakers have had only 30 years or so to figure it out.
Where does Miller think the greatest gains in local vineyards are still to be made?
“I would like to see more roots cut [mainly through close plowing] to further reduce vine vigor,” he says as we finish our coffees and get ready to go back to work. “And better drainage [through ditches or underground pipes] would drive the roots deeper, even on my hillside vineyard,” he says.
He notes that his vineyard has recently suffered some hail damage, the second time in three years, and he has yet to decide what to do to bring in the best crop. Fortunately, the damage occurred while the grapes were young and not full of juice.
And then he goes off, several weeks before any grapes will be harvested, to continue his task of making Chaddsford wine in the vineyard.
Blending Wines at Galer Estate
By Roger Morris
Like a financial portfolio manager who spreads his investments among stocks, bonds, CDs, funds and real estate, most winemakers would never limit themselves to making only one kind of wine. Or bottling a single wine that is not itself a blend of various cuvées or batches.
Part of this diversification among bottles and within bottles is a reflection of the winemaker’s own palate, but it is also homage to the marketplace, trying to discern what the customer wants to buy and drink.
I was thinking about this one recent afternoon as I was participating in a blending session at Galer Estate, the new winery behind Longwood Gardens that plans to sell its first wines in a couple of months. Owners Brad Galer, a trained physician and pharmaceutical executive, and Lele Galer, an artist and educator, sit across from each other at a round table at the winery as consulting winemaker John Levenberg and recently-hired assistant winemaker Catrina North take us through a panel of 2008 and 2009 Chardonnays and one of a 2009 rosé, all three of which will be bottled soon.
Why and how to blend wines is an interesting topic, both philosophically and practically. Anyone can make a blend.
As an example, take two white wines that you may have open and casually play with them – mixing them first half-and-half in a wine glass and then in increments to see which may be the dominant blend. It’s my observation that it’s human nature to prefer something you blend over just picking one wine and saying, “No, I can’t do anything to improve it.”
Practically, there are dozens of ways to blend, and I have talked with winemakers on four continents who like nothing better than to explain how and why they blend.
For example, grape farmers once planted vineyards with whatever vines were available. And if a Cabernet Sauvignon vine died, it might be replaced with Merlot, if that was handy. Some of these plots still exist, and grapes picked from them, with everything going into the same basket, are known as “field blends.” Sometimes grapes will be blended while fermenting rather than been made into separate batches, the most notable example being the co-fermentation of red Syrah grapes with a little white Viognier in the Rhone Valley and Australia.
Blends can be made from different varieties, from the same varieties grown in different locations, from batches fermented in stainless steel with those fermented in oak, those aged in oak and those not, and so one. And they can be blended before or after fermentation, before aging or after aging and just before bottling. Scratch any winemaker, and she or he will have a reason.
Meanwhile, back at the winery, North has laid out four glasses of ’09 Chardonnay in front of us – one the basic wine, and the other three with small but increasing amounts of sugar. Even most dry wines have a little sugar, just as most low-fat foods still have a little fat.
“It’s not just about sweetness,” Levenberg says. “I’m trying to develop a little ‘thickness’ or mouth feel in the wine.”
Although Levenberg has a California pedigree at such wineries as Hobbs, he is now located on Long Island and consults for a number of wineries. “Brad and Lele have different tastes,” he says with a grin which indicates that perhaps the blends he constructs may be somewhere between their preferences. But today, the disagreements are minor, and we all think the blend that has just a teensy-eentsy amount of sugar – 0.3 grams per liter – has the best flavor, balance and mouth feel.
We move on to the ’08 Chardonnays, which now have barrel age and have been stirred on their lees or dregs for seasoning and texture. An agreement is quickly reached that the same amount of sugar also works well here, so Brad and Lele will not have a wine fight. Today.
The rosé has been made by a process called saignée where a small amount of juice has been drained or “bled” off red grapes before fermentation. This juice is then fermented on its own, retaining just a touch of color, and our task is to decide on how much color and how much sweetness. Levenberg notes that the wine itself is a blend of Cabernet from the Galer’s Red Lion Vineyard and purchased Cabernet from Historic Hopewell Vineyard and purchased Merlot from Hopewell and Waltz vineyards. So we have a blend of vineyards and of grape varieties, as well.
It has been a fun and practical session, and I finish off my visit with a tour of the expanding facility – construction workers are all around us – where once Folly Hill made and sold wine. The finished property will have an expanded winery and cellar as well as a formal tasting room. An opening date has not been set. In addition, part of the old Folly Hill vineyard – now called Red Lion – is being replanted, and a pile of vines that have been ripped up looks like a giant Hollywood horror movie spider.
Perhaps in a few months, when I sit in the finished Galer Estate tasting room and sip the newly bottled Chardonnay, I will feel in a very minor way like its godfather.
Italian Grapes, Chester County Wines
By Roger Morris
“Given the success you and Eric Miller have had with making very good wines from Italian grape varieties grown locally, doesn’t it make sense to say that southern Chester County is a good place to grow them?” It is a late weekday afternoon, and I’m having a glass of Mahogany, a red proprietary blend, in the quiet tasting room at Va La Vineyards on the cusp of Avondale when I pop the question to Va La’s owner and winemaker, Anthony Vietri.
However, I have found out over the years that Vietri hates to be caught making generalizations that he might later regret. “The only thing I can tell you,” he says slowly, “is what I do here and what works for me on our one little plot of land in Avondale.” He grins.
Eric Miller, with whom I’ve argued wines for 25 years, is usually more direct and to the point: “Many of them – the grape varieties – are hard to grow,” Miller says, “and the clones for some of them are different than the ones in Italy. And, of course, the regions are different.”
“Getting disease-free vines is also a hassle,” he adds. That being said? “We’ve have made some nice wines out of Italian varietals, especially Barbera.”
Mark Chien, the well-respected and hard-working Pennsylvania state enologist, believes that among classic European vinifera grapes, the French ones – such as Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon – are the easiest to grow locally and, in general, make the best wines.
“I’m personally skeptical about Italian varietals,” Chien once told me when I was researching another article. “They are very tough to grow but, Tony and Eric have made some very nice wines from them.”
Just what grapes are we talking about? The ones most commonly grown in both northern Italy – let’s include Tuscany as well – and locally are the white wine producer, the dusky-tinged Pinot Grigio, and the red Sangiovese. “Both make decent wines,” but, for clonal differences and other reasons, “they are not as good here as in Italy,” Miller says. “Here, we use Sangiovese mainly as a blending grape.”
One of the grapes Miller blends Sangiovese with is Barbera, the second-most prized red grape of Italy’s Piemonte region, which is cozied in next to the Alps. His Due Rossi (“two reds”) wine made from the two grapes varies from year to year but is always quite good. He and Vietri, to my knowledge, are the only ones to grow Barbera in any quantity in the Brandywine region. And only Vietri grows Nebbiolo, the most prized grape in Piemonte, where it is used to make Barolo and Barbaresco. Although he has made wine from purchased Sangiovese grapes, Vietri is not a big fan of it locally.
“Italian varietals in general have bigger berries and tighter clusters, so they take more diligence,” Vietri once told me. “Barbera has the potential for potassium deficit, yet it grows well here. Nebbiolo is a pain in the ass.”
The biggest part of that pain is that the East Coast – unlike California and the classic growing areas of Europe – is extremely humid. Tight-bunched grapes tend to get mildew infection and rot, which means they need extra attention.
Miller adds that Barbera is a late-ripener, which means two things – it may not get fully mature, and the longer it stays on the vine, the more likely something bad will happen, such as autumn hail, frost or hurricane winds.
In spite of all this, the Italian-style wines that Miller and Vietri make are very popular with local drinkers. Miller’s Due Rossi, and Vietri’s Mahogany, Cedar and Castagna, also command relatively high prices for the extra effort – and extra results.
Most of the red blends the two men make are creative variations and certainly not traditional in Europe. I don’t know of an Italian winemaker who combines Sangiovese and Barbera, as Miller does in Due Rossi. Vietri’s top-of-the-line Mahogany combines Barbera with Corvina Veronese, the grape responsible for the lusty Amarone. His Cedar is primarily Nebbiolo, but has other grapes added.
Vietri also is fond with experimenting with the more-obscure Italian varietals – what the local mushroom growers might call “exotics” – such as Lagrein, Sagrantino, Teroldego, Charbono and Malvasia Nero.
Yes, northern Italian varieties can be hard to grow, but local wineries are showing they can make excellent wines. In spite of Miller’s qualifications and Vietri’s reluctance to extrapolate beyond his own “little plot of land in Avondale,” Miller continues to make a lot of quality wine from them, and Vietri has transformed his vineyard into an arbor for Italian grapes.
If they won’t fire up the bandwagon, then I’ll continue to hot-wire it.
Day Trip: Great Local Wineries Beyond Chester County (Less Than 50-Miles)
By Roger Morris
Joanne Levengood was in her vineyard doing some last-minute spring pruning when I caught up with her on her cell phone a few days ago. I had a few questions to ask the Berks County vintner for an article I was researching on women winemakers, and Joanne was multi-tasking on a warm day at Manatawny Creek Winery near Douglasstown where she is owner and cellar master.
As we talked, it occurred to me that what I really needed to do was drive to Douglasstown from my home in Landenberg – let’s see, north on Route 100 to Pottstown, then west on U.S. 422 a few miles – to visit the U.C. Davis-educated vintner and buy some of her delicious red wines for my own cellar. Then I thought about Brad Knapp, who makes some fabulous sparkling wines at Pinnacle Ridge Winery, a little farther away in Kutztown. Actually, it’s been a while since I tipped a glass at Fiore Winery in Pylesville, MD, just west of the Susquehanna near the Pennsylvania border.
Then the idea began forming – now that winter’s snowmageddon was behind us, why not spend a couple Saturdays driving around the countryside buying wines for a 50-mile wine cellar — those made within a 50-mile radius — the same way restaurants tout their locally sourced foods? It was a time to do some back-roads day tripping.
Like dandelions after an April rain, regional wineries have been popping up in great numbers over the past decade. Many of them make and sell wines that are right at home with those produced in traditional wine growing areas. As we turned into the new century, for example, there were only three or four wineries in southern Chester County. Now there are a dozen.
And there are some good regional wineries I have not visited. I have tasted very nice wines from Black Ankle Vineyards just northwest of Baltimore in Mt. Airy, but have not driven there. The same is true of Boordy Vineyards – the oldest in Maryland – just north of Baltimore in Hydes. Add those two to Fiore and to Terrapin Station in Elkton, which will finally open a tasting room this summer, and you have a vigorous Saturday or Sunday of Maryland travelenology.
West of the Susquehanna in York County, Allegro Winery in Brogue makes the best wine in the county, but Moon Dancer Winery just south of Columbia has one of the prettiest venues you could ask for, with a hilltop venue that overlooks the wide river. North of Lancaster, in Mannheim, Jan and Kimberly Waltz have sold grapes to other wineries for years. Now they have opened their own Waltz Vineyards and are making delicious wines.
North of us, Manatawny Creek and Pinnacle Ridge are the best bets, but there are others in the Lehigh Valley and the Berks County wine trails if you want other stops in the neighborhood. The best in Bucks County is Crossing Vineyards at Washington Crossing.
Things are not quite as interesting south of us on the Delmarva Peninsula, although there are some wineries popping up in the Easton area. Best bet is Nassau Vineyards on the way to/from the beaches near Lewes where Peggy Raley has been making wines from her home-grown and purchased grapes for almost 25 years. New Jersey has wineries not far over the bridge, but, for now, save your toll money.
You can get a good overview of Pennsylvania wineries at www.pennsylvaniawine.com and Maryland wineries at www.marylandwine.com. These will lead you to maps and wine trails.
Historical Hopewell Vineyard Goes Solar
By Roger Morris
On a gorgeous spring Saturday recently, I was talking with grape farmers Anthony and Karen Mangus at the edge of their hillside vineyard just west of Oxford when our conversation was interrupted by the clip-clopping of a horse-drawn Amish buggy a hundred yards away on Lower Hopewell Road.
It was a symbolic moment in a way, as the Amish families of the region are the original eco-farmers, largely because of their rejection of technology. In so doing, they have left a minimal carbon footprint in the almost 300 years they have lived here – unless one counts the occasional horse droppings along the back roads.
By contrast, the Manguses are pioneers in a new wave of ecology-driven agriculture which embraces advanced technology as a means to dramatically reduce their carbon-fuel emissions while leveraging the energy benefits. As we watched the horse and buggy pass below, above us, in an arc along the private dirt road leading up the hill into their Historic Hopewell Vineyard, stood a series of 11 tall pedestals, each containing 12 solar panels pointing due south.
The electricity generated by the 132 panels will supply the Manguses’ farm, along with a winery they have planned for the future, and return power to the Peco grid – which the rest of us depend on.
“The panels were just tilted up yesterday,” Tony says, his face bronzed from a week of vineyard pruning in the warm spring sun, “and a lot of cars have been slowing down for people to look.” But soon, the leaves on the trees along the access road and at the edges of the vineyard will hide the Manguses’ grove of solar towers as they quietly convert sunshine.
“We had to have them high enough so the farm tractor could pass under them,” Karen says. “The installation wasn’t cheap,” Tony adds, “but we do get an energy tax credit, and it will pay for itself in about five years.”
The vineyard is a second job for the Manguses – he is an airline pilot and she a marketing executive – although it doesn’t always seem that way. They started farming in 2002, something they had planned for several years, and now have 13 acres of vinifera or European varieties of grapes that they now sell to regional winemakers. The two have been environmentally conscious since the beginning, already using electric (GEM) vineyard vehicles, low-output sprayers and small solar units to power a bird-protection system and a small weather station.
“Each panel will produce about 3,000 watts,” Tony explains as we stand in the shade of one of the pedestals, and the system will produce more than 36,000 kilowatt hours annually.
The panels are solid state, requiring no maintenance, and are engineered to withstand high winds and the pounding of hail storms. The system is calculated to reduce carbon emissions by about 20 tons per year. The DC electric from the panels is converted into AC for the grid by four power inverters housed in an old farm shed standing at the edge of a large barn.
Although the Manguses’ solar-powered system is the largest in the area, it is not the first. Stargazers Vineyard near Embreeville installed rooftop solar panels a few years ago and also regularly contribute power to the Peco grid.
Paradocx Vineyard’s Year-Long CSA Membership
By Roger Morris
No matter how glittering Château Lafite looks in a crystal stem, no matter how many black ties winemakers don for celebrity wine auctions at Sotheby’s, and no matter how romantic it is to wander by candlelight through the Schramsberg sparkling wine cellars carved into the rock of the Mayacamas Mountains, wine is still nothing but farm produce.
Winemaker David Hoffman says that was his line of thought early last summer when he was driving back from picking up his weekly allotment of vegetables and fruit at the North Star Orchard CSA run by Ike and Lisa Kerschner. Why not start up a CSA at his own Paradocx Vineyard in Landenberg – one that rewarded those who signed up in advance with regular allotments of Chardonnay and Sangiovese, instead of bags full of Swiss chard and sugar snap apples?
“We had all talked about wines being farm produce before,” Hoffman told me as he was preparing for a consumer tasting at the winery recently, “but there seemed to be a disconnect between farming and traditional wine clubs. A community supported agriculture or CSA seemed to make more sense.”
Hoffman and his wife Karen own Paradocx along with Mark and Joanne Harris – all physicians, and thus a pair of docs.
Harris explained how it works: a full red wine share cost $650 annually, a white wine share $550 and a mixed or vintners share is $600. (White wines cost less to produce than barrel-aged reds do.) For this, the CSA subscriber gets 24 bottles of wine in four pickups, as well as event discounts and winery paraphernalia and an invitation to the four exclusive pickup parties. There are also half-shares available with 12 bottles of wine and reduced side benefits.
Paradocx started its CSA – the first wine CSA in Pennsylvania – at mid-year 2009 and got enough subscribers to encourage them to launch it for the full year in 2010.
Currently, there are about 50 individual and family CSA shareholders (more…)
Barrel Tasting at Patone Cellars
By Roger Morris
Over the past few weeks, I have been participating in barrel tastings – the universal winemaking ritual – in 14th-century castles in Bordeaux and stately farmhouses in Emilia-Romagna, but it still has the same magic in Chester County.
One of my recent local stops was Mario Patone’s garage winery, where I looked into barrels with him.
Patone’s day job is as a CPA, and this is crush season for him – income tax preparation – and he still was wearing the tools of that trade, white shirt and a tie, as we walked into his garage on South Guernsey Road in the countryside south of West Grove, where he traded his hand calculator for a long pipette and glistening wine glasses.
He moved aside some blueprints, proof that he expects to soon start building his official winery for Patone Cellars a couple of miles away on Route 841 and have at least part of it completed in time for the other crush time in his two-career existence – the 2010 grape harvest.
In many ways, the delicate curves of an oak wine barrel, with its stoppered round hole in its side, is a winemaker’s oracle. Patone dips the pipette into the barrel and draws out the dark purple liquid, barely six months old, and he can see into the past – what the 2009 growing season and harvest (more…)
Pairing Wine with Chocolate
By Roger Morris, Guest Contributor
When I first started seriously drinking wine some years ago, and writing about it, the standard food-matching prohibitions were no salads and no chocolates. Vinegar-based dressings would kill any wine, we were told, but that was before Caesar salads bearing hunks of chicken, washed down with California Chardonnay, became tout-le-rage.
I’m not sure what the excuse was for not letting wine and chocolate cohabit – perhaps there was fear that a dark truffle might overwhelm a wimpy, but prized red Bordeaux. But I rather suspect the experts wanted to keep the daring secret to themselves: That it wasn’t an apple that got Adam and Eve tossed from Eden. Instead, the two were having that “your place or mine” conversation over a handful of Godivas and a glass of tawny Port.
Nowadays, we absolutely love to combine wine and chocolate – and you can do it locally, as there are several Chester County artisan chocolate makers whose truffles will match quite well with local wines.
My personal preference is to have darker, harder, more-concentrated chocolates with red wines that have a lot of tannins. Indeed, the slightly bitter, dusty wine tannins are generally described as providing a “chocolate” finish to many of these wines. Cabernets Sauvignons, such as those Eric Miller makes at Chaddsford Winery and Gino Razzi crafts at Penns Woods Winery, go particularly well with these dark sweets.
Softer, creamier chocolate truffles are excellent with rounder, fruitier reds such as the Port-like, fortified Ruby K that Jim Kirkpatrick puts together at Kreutz Creek Vineyards or some of the rounded red blends vinted by David Hoffman at Paradocx Vineyard. And local Merlots made by a number of producers will match well.
Flickerwood Wine Cellars State Street Tasting Room
By Roger Morris, Guest Contributor
Over the past decade, I’ve gotten used to driving out to the tasting rooms at the 10 or so local wineries, but, more recently, these wineries have been taking their wines to pour where people work and shop – just as farmers bring their fruits and vegetables to produce markets in our towns and cities.
Chaddsford Winery’s vineyard is in Chadds Ford, for example, but has long had a popular outlet at Peddler’s Village in Bucks County. It’s the same with Paradocx Vineyard: they grow their grapes in Landenberg, and have a tasting room next to Starbucks in the Longwood shopping center on Route 1, and Kreutz Creek Vineyard is located in West Grove yet offer a tasting location in downtown West Chester.
In Flickerwood Wine Cellars case, its winery is in Kane–upstate Pennsylvania–where Ron and Sue Zampogna built it 10 years ago after Ron retired from the U.S. Forest Service.
“We had winery customers who live in this region,” Tammy Liberato, the Zampogna’s daughter, tells me from behind the tasting bar when I drop by, “and my sister Julie and I both live in Chester County, so we opened this tasting room in November, 2008. We had a very good first year.”
The tasting room is large and comfortable with seating at the bar or at tables and chairs for groups. Paintings by local abstract artist Jason Smith of West Grove hang in exhibition around the room. Live music is frequently played on weekends, and Flickerwood encourages people to bring their own food (BYOF) to enjoy with a glass or two. Of course, wine is sold by the bottle and case for those who want to take some home.
Flickerwood is a winery that, in the true tradition of most upstate wineries, tries to produce a wine for every taste: red and white, dry and sweet, blushes and fruit wines such as cranberry and blueberry. At any one time, there might be almost 30 different wines to sample if one were to try them all. A tasting of six wines costs $6, wines by the glass generally sell for $6, as well, and bottles are between $12 and $20. The tasting room opens at noon, Wednesday through Sunday,
To make things simpler, Tammy explains, there is a menu of six pre-arranged tasting flights in case you don’t want to assemble your own. “I like sweet wines, so in my flight, all the wines are sweet,” she says pointing to a heading called “Tammy’s Tasting,” which includes Cayuga Kiss, white Niagara, pink Catawba and Red Raspberry.
I decide to put together my own flight of dry wines–three whites and three reds–and Tammy gets the glass and bottles ready.
I start with the Chardonnay, which is quite pleasant with tropical fruits, a hint of cocoanut and a little earthiness. The Pinot Grigio has a tad of residual sugar, but is nice and fruity with good clearing acidity. The Gewurztraminer has a typical fruit oiliness with lots of spice and citrus notes. (more…)
Chester County’s Sweet & Spicy Holiday Wines
By Roger Morris, Guest Contributor
There are 10 wineries within a few minutes of Route 1, which bisects the county, and two of them–Kreutz Creek Vineyards and Chaddsford Winery-–specialize in sweet wines guaranteed to bring holiday cheer.
Fog is hanging in the nearby woods, and there is a heavy, cold drizzle when I step inside the tasting room at Kreutz Creek Vineyards south of West Grove. A smell of baking spices is in the air.
Jim and Carole Kirkpatrick, owners of Kreutz Creek, are at the tasting bar, and Jim, the winemaker, says that before I follow my nose toward what’s warming up in the Crockpot, I should first try his Ruby K.
True Port is made along the Douro River in Portugal, and international trade laws won’t let Kirkpatrick calls his fortified wine (18 percent alcohol) “Port,” but Ruby K truly in the Port mold – fresh, rich, dark blackberry and figgy flavors with strong hints of rich chocolate with fresh acidity in the finish. It certainly gets my naughty and nice award.
The Kirkpatricks think that Ruby K ($15 per half-bottle) is a true dessert wine – sip it in front of the fire, pour it over ice cream as a sauce or use it as a component in fondue.
fresh, rich, dark blackberry and figgy flavors with strong hints of rich chocolate with fresh acidity in the finish
“Last weekend, we made fondue with it in the tasting room,” Carole says. “We mixed a half-bottle of Ruby K in the fondue pot with two boxes of Bevans chocolate from Media – about 6 ounces each – and then dipped pieces of pound cake, strawberries and shortbread in it.”
Meanwhile, Jim dips a ladle into the Crockpot. “This is Holiday Wassail,” he says. “I use a base of white Niagara wine and mix with it pumpkin, apples, cinnamon and cloves.” The result is surprisingly light and refreshing – only 11 percent alcohol – mixing the fresh “grapiness” of Niagara with festive spices dominating the finish. It sells for $14 a bottle.
Kreutz Creek also makes a Cabernet Franc ice wine that sells for $45 a bottle. Traditionally, ice wine is made from grapes left to freeze on the vine and usually picked in the late night hours with the first big freeze. Freezing concentrates the sugar in the grapes, leaving behind a wine with flavors of honey and dried fruits. Increasingly, winemakers are simply freezing the grapes in cold lockers instead.
At Chaddsford Winery just up Route 1 from the Brandywine River Museum, winery manager Greg Kuhn lines up four wines made by Chaddsford owner and winemaker Eric Miller that fly off the shelves like Santa’s reindeer every holiday season:
• Sangri-La Sangria ($13),
• Holiday Spirits ($14), and
• Spiced Apple ($13), which all have spices added to the wines before bottling, and
• vintage 2008 Niagara ($13).
ripe berry flavors and aromas, a touch of grape juiciness and citrus spiciness with good acidity
“Of course, sangria is usually a summer wine,” Kuhn says, “but we’ve found a lot of people like to use it to make a seasonal punch.” It’s a very nicely balanced specialty wine – fresh ripe berry flavors and aromas, a touch of grape juiciness and citrus spiciness with good acidity.
The Holiday Spirit features “warmer” baking spices and rounded fruitiness – a touch on the cheery side – and Kuhn says it comes out the first of November and is usually sold out by the time the New Year gets under way.
Spiced Apple, of course, is apple-flavored, but the flavors are in two layers – baked apple aromas and tastes with a tart-apple finish. The 2008 Niagara is for those people who love the pungent aromas of fresh grape juice – heavier on the palate, but still nicely made.
While I was in the tasting room, two customers chatting among themselves debated on whether the wines tasted better chilled, heated or at room temperature. It sounds to me like an experiment that needs testing on a cold winter’s evening.
Roger Morris is a freelance writer and author of The Brandywine Book of Food.
Taste Buds Get Ready: 1st Annual Fermentation Fest
By Margaret Gilmour
Sweet. Salty. Sour. Bitter.
Ready for some fresh, local and lively (pun-intended) fare?
Because there will be a bountiful supply available for tasting at Friday’s Fermentation Festival at the Kennett Square Farmers’ Market.
You’ll want to attend a little bit hungry and ready to quench your thirst as the featured chefs, artisans and producers all interested in quality over quantity, are preparing a delicious spread just for you. And the farmers, of course, are selling their autumn harvest.
In addition to your favorite seasonal micro-brews and crisp wines, plan on dipping in and sipping on a variety of new-to-you flavors, like some of the featured fermented veggies and non-alcoholic beverages.
Sniff. Swirl. Sip. Repeat.
Then there’s Root, a novel root-beer liqueur, which is also ready for you to sample.
Just out this summer, Root’s successful debut comes from a Philadelphia company uniting slow design and all things handmade: Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction. The potent spirit is 100% organic, made from an 18th-century Pennsylvania folk recipe which eventually became birch or root beer. (more…)
Fermented Fare: Deliciously Prepared For You By Science and Nature
By Margaret Gilmour
Do you like sauerkraut? Pickles? Yogurt? Micro-Brews? Wine?
With an emphasis on healthy and a dose of fresh-flavor, a connection between all of these distinctive, lively foods and drink is fermentation: an age-old, natural process that has been around for thousands of years.
Here’s proof: a seven-thousand-year-old jar containing the remains of wine was on display at the University of Pennsylvania last year. And food fermentation is an ancient tradition our ancestors practiced annually to preserve their bounty from one season to the next.
Most of us eat fermented foods every day: chocolate, cheese, bread. Still, many of us associate fermentation with beer, wine and cider—where sugar is converted into ethyl alcohol.
Who knows if way back when the health benefits of fermentation were known? It is said, though, that Julius Caesar fed pickles to his troops to help them stay strong.
Will fermented food make you strong? Maybe not, but research shows that the process helps fight infection and increase absorption of nutrients.
Scott Grzybek, CEO and Founder of ZUKAY Live Foods, a probiotic food company in Elverson, PA (a stone’s throw from Chester County), started eating fermented foods years ago simply to maintain his well-being.
“I was sick of eating processed foods,” he says. “If it didn’t make me sick that week, I knew eventually it would.”
With that thought in mind, in 2004 he and his wife decided to try living off the land and “get back to traditional ways of cooking and preserving foods.”
That’s when Grzybek discovered fermentation and began studying the science behind the process.
“I came up with the idea that we could do this with everyday foods, and at the same time get the benefits out to everyone,” Grzybek says. A little over a year ago, he did just that by starting ZUKAY Live Foods.
To celebrate fermented fare, the Kennett Square Farmers Market is partnering with Harvest Market Natural Foods to throw a Fermentation Festival on Friday, October 9th, from 2 – 6:00 p.m.
And you are invited.
Alongside the farm stands selling fresh, local harvest, there will be specialty beer (from Victory Brewing Company and Twin Lakes Brewery) and wine tastings (from Stargazers Vineyard).
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