We’ve explored a fewnaturalwines over the course of this podcast and the associated blog, but we haven’t delved as deeply as we could have into this often-controversial topic. The fact is, Natural Wines are not something I know a great deal about, and nor do many of the podcast cohorts that I usually drink and record with. We needed an expert. Luckily, Friend of the Podcast and occasional guest Elizabeth Krecker knew just the man for the job.
Meet Timo Geis, the owner of Selection Sauvage. Selection Sauvage is a wine import company that focuses on select producers of natural wines across the world, focusing on filling the Arizona market for these vintages. Living in Sedona, Timo was a great fit for us to talk to about the topic, and his encyclopedic knowledge of the Natural Wine world helped me and Elizabeth to make sense of the topic. Timo is also a student at Yavapai College, where he’s hoping to translate his knowledge of Natural Wines to make some of Arizona’s first examples; one of which we drink in this podcast!
Images of wines from this episode. My personal favorites, for what it was worth, were the Skeletons from Junto Winery, and the Gewurtztramminer from Channing Daughters… though all were fantastic!
In the American Southwest, celebrations around the Fifth of May are a big thing. Known as Cinco de Mayo, American pop culture seems to hold that this date is the independence day for Mexico, but this is actually a misnomer. May 5th actually celebrates the Battle of Puebla, where a Mexican army defeated a French army that was trying to install a puppet regime there. The day is not even celebrated in Mexico, often passing by unremarked. But this podcast isn’t about cultural movements and deep cultural reasons why one day is celebrated my immigrants and their white neighbors, while natives in the homeland ignore the same day (and there is a lot to deep dive on the subject, this just isn’t the place). This podcast is about wine.
And, as it turns out, Mexican food is a great pairing for wines made from Riesling. Not only that, as it turns out, Mexican food and German food form really delicious fusion cuisine. So I invited some friends over and took blatant advantage of the day to make some sauerkraut and pork tacos with Pico de Gallo brought by Nikki… and we had a lot of Riesling. Bottles came from Arizona, Italy, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Germany, from a wide variety of styles. Grab a taco and dig in while you take a listen. You’ll be glad you did.
Some of the fantastic Riesling vintages we drank while recording this episode…
Lately in the American wine scene, a new beverage with ancient roots has been taking the world by storm: Piquette.
Occasionally described as “White Claw for Wine Lovers,” Piquette is a low-alcohol fizzy beverage made from adding water to the grape pomace left over after grapes have been pressed for wine. This water-pomace mix is then fermented until the result reaches somewhere between 5%-9%; about the same percentage of alcohol that one normally finds in beer or hard seltzer. Incidentally, this makes Piquette the nigh-ideal beverage for day drinking in the warm summer months. The oft-made comparison to White Claw is where the title for this episode comes from, courtesy of Mitch Ermatinger of Native Species Winery in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has made some very entertaining stickers and T-shirts with that saying that you all should check out.
However, unlike hard seltzers, Piquette has a long history. The name most commonly used to describe these beverages, Piquette, is derived from the French word for “prickle”; referring to the slight fizz present in most versions of this drink. Piquette was said to have been the preferred drink of vineyard workers at the lunch table, since the low alcohol content encouraged post-lunch productivity, rather than the alcohol-fueled stupor that could be expected from wines with a higher percentage of alcohol. In Italy, Piquette has various names including acqua pazza, acquarello and vinello. That being said, nearly all European winemaking countries have their own version of Piquette, which is usually made and consumed by field workers and their families. The fact is, Piquette was a great way to stretch what one could make from a given harvest. But, Piquette has ancient roots too. The Greeks and Romans made versions of this drink too. The Romans, calling it lora, often considered this beverage to be a meager, cheap-to-produce drink. Since it was made from what basically amounts to the leftover scraps of winemaking, it was usually given to slaves and field workers.
Times have changed, however. What was once seen purely as a drink for the poor working folk has rapidly skyrocketed into popularity in the twenty-first century. Why this is the case, I’m not sure, though I have my theories. The Marxist in me wants to complain about the gentrification of poor culture to appease the ever-thirsty desires of the rich bourgeoise for novelty, I’m not so sure that has a lot to do with it. There is the simple fact of the matter that most wineries are on the knife-edge of a budget and making Piquette increases the amount of inventory, and therefore the amount of money that flows into a winery, but I’m not so sure that’s a major cause either. Instead, I would argue that modern sanitization techniques, even in wineries focused on Natural Wine, has made it possible for winemakers to combat and prevent the bacterial infections which could easily occur otherwise, and controlling the ones that do occur… which can partially lead to the intriguing flavor profiles you get in many Piquette wines.
Basically, this means that modern Piquette tastes far better than its ancestors. Combined with a plague which often lead to day drinking in quarantine, and you have a perfect storm to increase this beverage’s popularity. But I digress. In this episode, podcast newcomer Brianna Nation of Page Springs Cellars joins all of us to drink some Piquette, and share her experiences about making it– she made the Piquette de Vidal that features as the second vintage of the recording. We also drink two Piquettes from Saeculum Cellars, another Arizona Winery, and one from Old Westminster Winery in Maryland.
Drink up folks! Remember, No regrets when drinking Piquettes! Oh, and since one of the Piquettes from Saeculum Cellars is made of Cabernet Franc, that brings our current total for this varietal to 8.
Apologies for the long absence. Again, life has gotten very much in the way of things. In this case, it was a move back to a mountaintop lair in Jerome after some rather gruesome personal trauma… and, well, the original episode I was going to share for number ten was about Tasting Room etiquette…
Which seemed uh, kinda pointless right about now in the midst of Covid-19 when we’re drinking our wines at home. After some debate and much procrastination, I decided to switch the order of some upcoming episodes, since listening to podcasts is a great way to occupy oneself during these days. So.. We’re starting up again. Hopefully, there will be some kind of regular schedule again… but life has a rather annoying way of ruining regular schedules.
In this episode, I hang out with some friends, drinking the wines made by Sal Mannino (@carbonicmass on Instagram), who has been a long-time follower of mine on the ‘grams. All of these wines were made from grapes grown in New Jersey. Furthermore, these are grapes I never expected to see growing in the verdant lands of New Jersey; all of these are varietals I am much more familiar with here in Arizona. (Well, with the exception of Pinot Noir, that is; I’ve had plenty of fun Pinot Noir vintages from Maryland on northwards to Massachusetts, but I digress… but what else is new there?)
Nick and Ed, over at New Jersey Wine Reviews also tried some of these same wines at a dinner event, as well as a few different vintages that we didn’t get to imbibe; pop on over to their blog and take a look. Sal Mannino himself joins us just after halfway through the podcast, via phonecall; prior to this, my friends Dina Ribado, Isla Bonifield, and Tracy and Chuck Demsey drink through his wines and give our thoughts and comment on tasting notes and the techniques used to make these unique vintages.
Tracy and Chuck were kind (and awesome) enough to host at their awesome bakery and bottle shop, ODV Wines. If you are ever in the Phoenix area and need super-cool wines or super awesome pastries, be sure to stop by their spot–tell them Cody the Wine Monk sent you. I love their shop to pieces, and I specifically recommend her lemon bars.
The gang posing with the wines from Sal Mannino. If you like what you hear, be sure to contact him on instagram for information on how to join his wine club.
I get asked somewhat often, “What are tasting notes, really?” Or rather, to be honest, I get asked: “What am I supposed to be tasting, anyway?”
Well, when you get down to it, you taste what you taste. Sure, I can help, but really, wine is such a subjective thing that I generally hate to push what I think I’m tasting or smelling onto the drinker I’m with. This can also make tasting notes (and notes on the aromatic profiles of wine) seem somewhat arbitrary to the beginner. And that’s okay!
Basically, tasting notes refer to a wine taster’s (or, in some cases, a coffee taster’s!) testimony about the aroma, taste identification, acidity, structure, texture, and the balance of a wine, designed to allow the reader to get an idea of what the experience of imbibing that particular vintage is like. They can get as creative as you like, or as simple as you like. Often-times, such notes may seem like gibberish, but this Sommelier-speak has a code that isn’t as difficult to translate as beginners think. In short, what you taste, is what you taste.
These notes are NOT related to what is in the wine or how it was made, usually; these flavors are not added. The winemakers for this wine didn’t pour in pickle juice during fermentation, for example. In many cases, they aren’t even the same molecule, but they hit the receptors in the olfactory lobes of the brain in the same way as those flavors in food, drink, or spices do. Wine Folly has a great article on how to approach writing your own tasting notes which can be found here.
For this podcast discussing Tasting notes, Elizabeth Krecker and I decided to drink the 2014 Sémillon from Dirty and Rowdy Family Winery, based out of Napa Valley, though they source grapes from multiple vineyards across the state of California. This wine is a complex blend of two different styles of fermentation; one on the skins (a.k.a., Amber Wine) and another aged in concrete. Elizabeth and I loved the tasting notes that they used to describe their wines and thought it would be fun to explore what we tasted in this wine versus what the winemakers tasted. They’ve got a lot of fun wines, and I highly recommend them.
The 2014 Sémillon from Dirty and Rowdy Family Wines is not only our stepping stone into a discussion of what tasting notes are but also our first revisit of the California wine industry.
Delaware is an often overlooked state in the US, but like all states, does have a winemaking tradition. Today’s wine focus is the 2017 Delaware, from Pizzadili Vineyard, located in the town of Felton. This slightly sweet skin-contact white wine is made from 100% Delaware, a grape which is ironically not named after the state at all. (It actually gets its name from a place in Ohio, but you’ll hear about that in the podcast itself.) Delaware is a cultivar derived from Vitis labrusca, in case you were wondering; it is also a grape with a long history in the United States and was historically for making some of America’s first sparkling wines… which is why this is a grape varietal we will meet again on a later episode, mark my words. This is our second “amber” wine of the podcast, as this wine saw extensive skin contact before fermentation began, according to the folks I met in the tasting room.
The state of Delaware lags behind other parts of the Mid-Atlantic states in terms of wineries and vineyards; I was able to visit three out of the state’s five vineyards when I was in the area in November of 2018. The history of viticulture here begins with Swedish colonists in the area who planted grapes and made wine in Delaware as early as 1638. (Yes, at one point Sweden was a colonial empire with American interests!) When the Dutch took over the area in the mid 17th century, they similarly promoted viticulture in the area but found the area more suitable for apple orchards and cider instead. It wasn’t until 1991 when the Raley family sponsored and wrote farm winery legislation (which passed in a near-record two months) that the situation changed. This change in winery legislation allowed for the founding of Nassau Valley Vineyards, which opened in October of 1993. Pizzadili Winery is the state of Delaware’s second oldest winery, opening in 2007. At this time, the state of Delaware has no AVAs.
I acquired this bottle directly from the tasting room for this podcast in November of 2018. Megan joins us again for this episode. Interestingly; she didn’t like this wine while I found it completely fascinating… but you’ll hear more about that.
The 2017 Delaware from Pizzadili Winery is our introduction to the state of Delaware wine. This wine underwent extensive skin maceration prior to fermentation… so I’m calling it a skin-contact white wine.
Vermont is the focus of our 16th episode here at the Make America Grape Again podcast. Barely more than a stub of a Wikipedia page, Vermont so far has only seven wineries, and a very recent beginning, with the first commercial vineyard there being only since 1997. But boy howdy, have they been running to catch up with the rest; the wine we selected for the first episode examining the viticultural industry in this state has absolutely blown me away. It is not every day that I meet a wine that can single-handedly make me doubt my commitment to Arizona viticulture, but the 2016 Tectonic from Iapetus Wine (a label from Shelburne Vineyard) has done just that.
The 2016 Tectonic is our vintage introduction to a number of new wine concepts, as well as a continuation of some themes we explored in our last episode about Wisconsin wine. This vintage is an all-natural, skin-contact wine made from a grape called La Crescent. We touched upon natural wines a little bit in our first California episode; to explore the idea further, these wines can be roughly defined (since there is no official legal definition as of yet) as wines that are farmed as organically as possible, and are made/transformed without adding or removing anything while in the cellar. The idea is that these wines are fermented using the natural yeast growing on the grape, without any additives or processing aids, and that intervention in the fermentation is kept to a minimum. These wines are not fined, nor filtered, and it can be argued that the result is a wine that is “alive”–still full of naturally occurring microbiology and the truest expression of the terroir of a region possible.
Like the Seyval Blanc we examined in our last episode, La Crescent is a complex American hybrid varietal, and one which is very recent; only developed by the University of Minnesota and released in 2002. The genetics for this grape look like something out of a Habsburg family tree: with ancestry including Vitis vinifera, riparia, rupestris, labrusca and aestivalis. Saint-Pepin, and a Muscat of Hamburg crossing feature among this grape’s progenitors. (I really wish I still had the genetics diagram I referenced when recording this wine–I lost it somewhere. Alas.) Also like Seyval Blanc, this grape is a white wine varietal; to make a Skin-contact wine such as the 2017 Tectonic (also known as Amber wines or Orange wines), the grape skins are not removed from the must, (unlike in as in typical white wine production) and instead remain in contact with the juice for days or even months. As in red wines, these skins provide pigments and tannins to the resulting vintage. This is actually a very ancient style of wine, dating back at an absolute minimum of about 6,000 years in the Caucasus Mountains.
That, in my mind, is one of the coolest things about the 2016 Iapetus: it is made from an ancient style of production for one of the newest-developed grape varietals out there. I look forward to hopefully trying more wines from this label: Ethan Joseph is doing some pretty cool stuff up there in Vermont.
While I first encountered this wine via a #winestudio event on Twitter, this bottle was provided to me through the kindness of Elizabeth Krecker who purchased this wine for me directly from the vineyard when she visited New England earlier this year.
The 2016 Tectonic from Iapetus wine is, without a doubt, my favorite wine of this podcast so far. There, I said it.
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