Author: Paul Ting

Categories
Food & Drink Living

Sweet wine for your Valentine: Our favorite local dessert wines

King Family Vineyards 2016 Loreley is produced from 100 percent petit manseng, and dried in oak barrels, which gives it additional aromas and flavors. Staff photo.

Some “serious” wine drinkers malign sweet wines. It’s understandable, because most are mass-produced simply by adding sugar to a red or white base that doesn’t have much character to begin with. True connoisseurs stop short of condemning the whole category, knowing that some are made with great care and skill (and without added sugar), and considered among the greatest wines in the world (Sauternes, from the Bordeaux region in France, is the best-known example).

Local sweet wines may not rise to that level, but many are of very high quality, produced using methods followed for centuries by European winemakers. The essential task is twofold: Naturally increase the sugar content of the grapes, and then stop the fermentation process before the yeast converts most of the sugar into alcohol.

There are several ways to achieve greater sugar concentration: Let the fruit ripen longer before picking (to make so-called “late harvest” wines), dry the grapes after picking, allow or cause the fruit to freeze (water exits in the form of ice), or, in very specific conditions, let the fungus Botrytis cinerea poke tiny holes in the grape skins before harvesting, which causes the fruit to dehydrate (commonly known as “noble rot”).

While conditions in Virginia are not conducive to noble rot, the other techniques mentioned are indeed utilized by local winemakers to produce sweet wines of notable character. These wines can be paired with confections (layer cake or chocolate-covered strawberries, anyone?), but a small glass can also stand alone as a liquid dessert. Certainly, these wines should not be reserved only for Valentine’s Day, but they are high-quality, delicious wines that should help you win over anyone’s heart.

Here are some that I recommend:

2017 R.A.H Series 1 (by Maya Hood White)

$35 per 375ml bottle

Maya Hood White, associate winemaker and viticulturist at Early Mountain Vineyards, utilizes a technique known in Italy as appassimento, where grapes are dried on straw mats after harvest. R.A.H are the initials of White’s beloved grandmother, and the wine is clearly something from the heart. This wine is 75 percent petit manseng and  25 percent malvasia, which adds some delicacy on the palate and enhances the aroma, which is honeyed with scents reminiscent of dried tropical fruits and melon. The wine is luscious but not too heavy, with flavors of dried apricot and honeysuckle, stewed banana, and pineapple. Only a very small quantity of this was made, and it is well worth seeking out. Available at The Wine Guild of Charlottesville and In Vino Veritas.

2013 Michael Shaps Raisin d’Être White

$25 per 375ml bottle

This dessert wine from Michael Shaps made it into the Virginia Governor’s Case in 2019, just as the 2012 vintage did in 2015. It’s made from 100 percent petit manseng that has undergone drying. However, in a unique nod to Virginia’s history, Shaps has repurposed old barns once used to dry tobacco leaves to “raisin” the grapes. The wine presents aromas of white raisins and tropical fruits. The flavor initially is very forward, with lots of dried and candied tropical fruit, but transitions nicely into fresh acidity that brings to mind fresh pineapple and tangerine. The finish is long and complex.

2016 King Family Vineyards Loreley

$29 per 375ml bottle

Although there is no vintage designated on the bottle, this is the 2016 vintage of Loreley. A previous vintage was included in the 2017 Governor’s Case. Produced from 100 percent petit manseng dried after picking, this wine also ages for a time in oak barrels, lending additional aromas and flavors. On the nose, apricot and orange predominate, with a floral hint, and the wine fills the mouth with orange, vanilla, honey, and roasted-nut flavors.

2015 Barboursville Vineyards Paxxito

$32 per 375ml bottle

Yet another appassimento wine, hence the name Paxxito, a variation of passito. Moscato ottonel and vidal blanc grapes are harvested early in order to capture the natural acidity in the grape. Early harvesting, however, means lower sugar levels. Drying offsets this deficit, and the formula clearly works—the 2014, 2013, and 2008 vintages have all been included in Virginia Governor’s Cases. The aroma is floral and fruity, which might lead you to anticipate a light-bodied wine. However, it is of medium weight on the palate, with flavors of honey, apricots, toasted almonds, and background notes of peach and fresh mint.

2015 Rockbridge Vineyard V d’Or

$25 per 375ml bottle

This blend of vidal blanc, vignoles, riesling, and traminette is made in the style of an ice wine, meaning the grapes are frozen and the ice removed before fermentation, which concentrates the flavors, acid, and sugar. The 2010 vintage was featured in the 2015 Governor’s Case. On the nose, there is a distinct lemon-lime character. The wine is relatively light-bodied and shows loads of acidity and a flavor like fresh lemonade made with honey. A hint of citrus peel bitterness adds complexity to the finish.

2014 Veritas Vineyard and Winery Kenmar

$20 per 375ml bottle

Also made ice-wine style but from 100 percent traminette, a hybrid grape derived partly from gewürztraminer. Like its parent, traminette is full of spicy and floral aromas, and a distinct perfumed character. All of this comes through in this wine. The nose is very forward, with the floral, perfumed scents joined by white pepper. Like other ice wines, it is lighter on the tongue than one might expect, and high acidity provides lift for the flavors of flowers, honey, dried mango, candied pineapple, and citrus.

2016 King Family Vineyards “7”

$31 per 500ml bottle

In Portugal, the grapes made into port barely begin fermenting before brandy is added. This increases the alcohol level and halts fermentation, preserving the freshness and sweetness of the fruit. King Family adopted this process, letting a crush of petit verdot reach the desired sweetness and then introducing Virginia brandy. The wine is aged in old Woodford Reserve bourbon barrels. This unique combination of methods and ingredients produces a deep-red wine with aromas of plum, blackberry, fig, and vanilla. The flavor follows along with a rich, sweet flavor of red fruit and hints of smoke and leather.

Categories
Knife & Fork

Offbeat but on point: Lightwell Survey winery pushes into new territory

Winemaker Ben Jordan’s creations for Early Mountain Vineyards are lush and more familiar tasting than those for his Lightwell Survey side project, where he applies a spirit of creativity and curiosity to produce wines he calls “unusual” and “provocative.” Photo: John Robinson

On a sunny, blustery day in October, friends and fans of the four-year-old Virginia winery Lightwell Survey gathered in Waynesboro to celebrate the 2017 vintage release. Notably, a clown juggled red balls while swaying on a balance board, keeping the mood light—and slightly off-kilter. The winery’s neighbors in the complex include a concrete-fabrication facility as well as blacksmithing, glass blowing, and ceramics studios. The exposed brick, casement windows, fading green paint, and thick ceiling beams spoke to the site’s history, while the vibrancy of the new tenants generated a palpable sense of creativity and renewal.

Brothers Sebastian and Jay Zutant and winemaker Ben Jordan founded Lightwell in 2015. Jordan holds the same title at Early Mountain Vineyards in Madison County and at Midland Construction, a venture with his brothers Tim and Gray, which produces wine from grapes grown at the family’s farm in Fort Defiance, Virginia. Jay Zutant, a digital whiz who’s worked at StubHub, eBay, and Vivino, added his business acumen to the team as well as financing. Sebastian Zutant’s resume reads like an insider’s list of where to eat in Washington, D.C., with stints at Nectar, Komi, Rasika, The Red Hen, Proof, All Purpose, and now Primrose. But it might be his self-professed love of “goth punk rock” that best explains the aesthetic of Lightwell Survey. “Goodbye Horses,” the winery’s riesling, is named after Zutant’s favorite song—the one that plays in Silence of the Lambs while the killer is putting on makeup.

Jordan met Sebastian Zutant on a wine project for The Red Hen, which Zutant opened in 2014 as a partner and head of the beverage program. The men bonded quickly, in part because of a shared affinity for wines imported by Louis/Dressner Selections, which can be described as “non-interventionalist,” meaning, they seek to express the nature of the land and the grapes with minimal manipulation. Both Jordan and Zutant had come to love these wines in the early ’80s, long before the “natural wines” trend.

Zutant and Jordan agreed to launch Lightwell and jointly set its direction. Jay Zutant tossed in his lot with the visionaries, including the one who hired the clown (not Jordan), and together they began searching for grapes to express their tastes. Jordan describes the philosophy of Lightwell Survey as one that applies a spirit of creativity and curiosity to produce “unusual, delicious, and provocative wines,” per the brand’s website.

Lightwell Survey wines make their first impression with the labels—dark, folksy, sharp-edged illustrations by D.C. artist John DeNapoli. Each wine has its own backstory, and the artist’s interpretation of that story guides the label art. It is intentionally sinister and dramatic (remember, Silence of the Lambs), like a poster for a rock ‘n’ roll gig. The non-traditional branding echoes inside the bottle as well.

Jordan says the Lightwell team is always asking “What if…?” and “Why can’t we…?” They have valued these two questions, and the answers they produce, from the very start of their collaboration. Exhibit A: The 2017 Los Idiots, a blend of 59 percent syrah (red) and 41 percent riesling (white)—unusual, to be sure, but also successful. However, Jordan is also careful to emphasize that respect for established winemaking traditions informs their ethos.

“We’re not just being weird,” he says, underlining his point with an analogy: “You can craft a chair, and it can be highly creative and even look very odd but, in the end, there are certain principles about being a chair. It still has to hold someone up when they sit on it.”

The winemaking approach is self-described as minimalist: no added yeast, low to no added sulfur, and no filtering unless needed for stability in the bottle. The results, he hopes, are “aromatically driven wines with depth of flavor.” Judging by the tasting in Waynesboro, he hits the mark.

Jordan’s work for Early Mountain places him high among the ranks of central Virginia’s “traditional” winemakers, but with Lightwell he is deliberately pressing into scarcely charted territory. One sign of this is the lack of a central vineyard. Jordan seeks grapes planted in cooler climates, at relatively high elevations, or in stony soil. Lightwell eschews the “wine trail model” of large buildings in more populated areas. This enables them to choose fruit suitable to the wine they want to make, obviates a large capital investment, and makes more grapes available in a state where they’re in increasingly short supply. This unencumbered, small-scale model is common among the more established winemaking regions of the world—and perhaps a sign that Virginia’s wine industry is emerging from its infancy and entering a new stage of maturity.

More than once, Jordan reiterates that “we are both looking forward and remembering the past.” Ultimately, one can sense the tension between a reflective respect for what’s come before and an excited curiosity about what’s next. This tension seems to be reflected in the character of the wines, as if what is in the subconscious of the winemaker cannot help but be expressed in the wine. Lightwell Survey is still a very small winery, producing fewer than 1,000 cases a year. But one gets the sense that Jordan and the Zutants would like the business to grow, guided, of course, by the baseline questions “What if…?” and “Why not…?”

Lightwell Survey wines can be purchased online at lightwellsurvey.com

 

Taste test: A red and a white by Lightwell Survey

2017 Hintermen

72 percent riesling, 28 percent petit manseng; $29.99

This white combines a grape that is relatively rare in Virginia, riesling, with one that holds great promise here, petite manseng. Hinterman has a shy nose that teases with hints of tropical fruit flavors (papaya, mango, pineapple) characteristic of petite manseng. On the palate these flavors are also present and in balance, demonstrating the composition of the wine. The acid of the riesling provides a lift but is balanced by some roundness and texture on the tongue that comes from the petite manseng. The finish lingers like lime hard candy, inviting another sip.

2017 Los Idiots

59 percent syrah, 41 percent riesling; $29.99

The combination of grapes in these proportions is already noteworthy, but Jordan goes a step further by letting them ferment and rest together on the skins (instead of post-fermentation blending). Los Idiots has a penetrating nose of strawberry overlaid with Asian spices (anise, five spice, cardamom). On the palate, violet and rose floral elements emerge, as does a lime-strawberry taste like one of those interesting Jell-o combinations. The finish is complex and elusive. Lemon? Lime? Pineapple? Ultimately, the wine is light and refreshing, with many layers of flavor.

Lightwell Survey wines can be purchased online at lightwellsurvey.com

Categories
Living

Raise a glass to 2019: Winemakers reflect on a great vintage

Luca Paschina, winemaker at Barboursville Vineyards, has high hopes for the 2019 vintage. "We will be celebrating this growing season for many years to come," he says. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith

Like all agricultural endeavors, growing grapes is subject to the vicissitudes of weather. In Virginia, after a difficult 2018 harvest (because of rain, rain, and more rain), 2019 was good—some would say great—thanks to timely precipitation and stretches of warm, sunny weather.

“This vintage is a beautiful gift to the faithful farmer,” says Luca Paschina, the winemaker at Barboursville Vineyards. “We will be celebrating this growing season for many years to come, for giving us white wines of great intensity and fragrance and reds of unquestionably long age-worthiness.”

Part of this optimism flows from a sense of relief after 2018. Overcast and wet conditions can present serious challenges in both the vineyard and the winery. Lack of sunlight hinders the fruit’s growth and ripening, decreasing sugar content (it is this sugar that is fermented into alcohol), and producing grapes that lack flavor and can taste “green,” or undesirably vegetal. High moisture can also allow mold, mildew, and disease to take hold, leading to damaged fruit and diminished yields. In one of the sadder images of 2018, some winemakers simply left grapes to rot on the vine, because they had burst from too much water and, regardless, the ground was too soft to move harvesting machinery into place.

The next growing season could not have arrived fast enough. Chris Hill, who has been cultivating grapes in Virginia since 1981, says that better vintages share “the common thread of dry weather from mid-August through mid-October.” In his opinion, 2019 should be compared to great vintages such as 1998, 2002, 2007, 2010, and 2017. But Kirsty Harmon believes 2019 is the best vintage since 2008, when she started as winemaker at Blenheim Vineyards.

Joy Ting, research enologist for the Winemakers Research Exchange (and this writer’s wife), explains that, in addition to a dry season, an abundance of sunlight helped to ripen fruit much earlier than in previous years. “The white grapes came in quickly since daytime temperatures were high and sugar accumulated rapidly,” she says. “A little bit of rain and slightly lower temperatures allowed the red grapes to stay on the vine. This led to very good flavor and tannin development.”

Ting also puts forth a theory, shared by a number of winemakers, that the exceptionally wet conditions of 2018 led to higher groundwater levels in 2019, compensating for rainfall one to three inches below average last July through September. Winemakers Emily Pelton at Veritas Vineyard and Winery, and Michael Heny at Michael Shaps Wineworks, agree with Ting. “I was thankful for all of the rain that we had in 2018,” Heny says. “We had so much groundwater that the vines [in 2019] had everything they needed.”

But what about the 2019 wines? High quality, fully ripe fruit picked when the winemaker thought it had achieved optimal conditions (rather than because the next storm was coming), should lead to high quality, aromatic whites and full-bodied, age-worthy reds. It’s impossible at the moment to recommend specific bottles from the vintage—because, well, the wines are unfinished and unbottled—so I asked winemakers which 2019 wines held the greatest promise. “I feel that, in general, red wines more acutely express the quality of a vintage,” says Nathan Vrooman, winemaker at Ankida Ridge Vineyards. “The white wines coming from the region will be very good, but the red wines will really shine.”

Among those, cabernet franc appears to be rising to the top. Finot says the King Family cabernet franc “performed very well this year.” At Veritas, Pelton calls the 2019 crop “bright and vibrant and full of depth.” Paschina singles out Barboursville’s harvest from Goodlow Mountain, about a mile south of the winery, as perhaps its “most elegant wine of the vintage.” Similarly, Rachel Stinson Vrooman, the winemaker at Stinson Vineyards, points to her cabernet franc as “ripe and concentrated, but also maintaining some of the pretty florals and herbal aromas that I look for.” At Keswick Vineyards, winemaker Stephen Barnard believes the estate’s Block 2 cabernet franc to be “the best expression of terroir yet—savory, extracted, spicy.”

Other varieties to look for in 2019 include pinot noir from Ankida Ridge—one of the few area wineries growing the grape—and chardonnay from Loudoun County’s Wild Meadow vineyard. At Michael Shaps, Heny will use the chardonnay in a vineyard-specific wine; he anticipates the 2019 bottling to rival that of 2015, one of my own personal favorites. Also worth noting, according to Harmon, are albariño, a grape grown mostly in Spain and Portugal that’s still relatively rare in Virginia, and cabernet sauvignon, which the lingering dry heat of 2019 helped to achieve full ripeness and flavor.

With uniformly high hopes for the 2019 vintage, Pelton provides some perspective. “I think it is important for us not to lose sight of how fantastically wine tells the story of the year,” she says. “Great years tend to get all of the attention, but the fact that we get to capture all of the aspects of the fabric of a year—whether it was cool or windy or dry or wet—all speaks to the final product, and I find it thrilling to be a part of that story.”