Wine Blogging Wednesday - Boy am I late

Wow am I late. Perhaps I was too enamoured with my posting of the Twitteleh video, but I have been dropping the ball on blogging. Last Wednesday was the sixty first edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, founded and hosted by Lenn at LENNDEVOURS.

As the year progresses it is slowly becoming more and more obvious to me that my hobby of wine blogging is going to be hurting. The time commitment that blogging is will easily get in the way of work. I hate it when work gets in the way of life. So, I will definite keep blogging and tasting and writing. I just might not have the luxury of posting something on my blog as often as I would like.


That being said, lets dive into the topic: Drink Local. Lenn loves this topic, mostly because it allows him to write about the wines he covers anyway, and forces those of us in the New York area to taste and write about New York wines.


Not that I can blame the guy. Some of these wines are damn tasty!


The rub with this topic is that Lenn also wanted us to go out and visit the winery that we write about. Something I would have loved to have done, but there was just no way I was getting out to Long Island, the Hudson Valley, or the Finger Lakes. It just did not happen.


So, I did the next best thing, tasted (tasted... who am I kidding... guzzled!) a wine from a winery I had visited and tasted a wine from a winemaker I know who makes his wine in Long Island.



The first was one of the tastiest Sauvignon Blancs I have had the pleasure of imbibing from the East Coast. Channing Daughters Sauvignon Blanc 2008 is fantastic. The taste was so fresh and so crisp, that even though the cooler weather is here, I felt like I could have been enjoying this wine on a hot beach. It was that refreshing. Lime, grapefruit, and jalapeno (a taste I have been identifying in more and more Sauvingon Blancs) with a little roundness that might have been pear. It was supposed to go well with the sushi I wanted to have, but instead went very well with Vietnamese.


The other wine I drank (definitely finished the bottle and went and purchased another at Crush) was Schneider Vineyards "le breton" Cabernet Franc 2007. I can hear all of my old coworkers who are reading this (its OK, you can leave a comment!) making sounds of amusement. Not because of the wine, but because they still work with the winemaker, Bruce Schneider. Back in May, when I participated in Lenn's TasteCamp East, I had some amazing Cabernet Francs that blew away the Merlot I had tasted. Lenn even wrote about Bruce's wine last year.


So, for this blog post I asked Bruce if he had a bottle to spare. He humored be and let me have a sample. I should have asked for another bottle. This wine was very good, with tasty earthy cherry up front moving into a rich finish. You should go find it if you can, or you should become friendly with the winemaker...

TasteCamp - The Last Day

Three weeks and several blog posts later, I have finally come to the end of the story of TasteCamp. It was a lot of fun, we had a lot of laughs, we sipped, we spit, we slurped, and we... sorry, ran out of 's' words... we enjoyed ourselves.



On the last day we visited two wineries, Wolffer Estate Vineyards and Channing Daughters. Both of these wineries are located on the South Fork of Long Island, better known as the Hamptons. You may have heard of them.







To get there, Leah and I had the choice to drive down the North Fork to where the two forks merge and then dive back up the South Fork or to take a ferry over to Shelter Island and then another ferry to the South Fork. Being a water-going gal, Leah immediately opted for the ferry ride. We got primo parking on the ferry boat so that we could see the stretch of the water and the island we were approaching. While it was a grey day, it was still much nicer than watching highway...


I will not spend too much time talking about Wolffer, although not because I did not enjoy the visit. My company represents Wolffer and I feel it would be inappropriate for me to talk about the wines. What I will say is that I would love to go back and visit one a bright sunny day. Their tasting room was very nice and there was a porch that overlooked the vineyards that I would imagine to be stunning when the sun was shinning. As it was, the day was rainy and a little chilly.

After leaving Wolffer we went to Channing Daughters, which for me was one of the best visits of the trip. There were giant sculptures in each of the vineyards, which we later learned was one of the ways they marked each block and called them by the sculpture's name. All of the pieces of artwork are the creation of Owner/Sculptor Walter Channing. In the middle of the vineyards was an upside-down oak, which is the winery's logo.

The tasting room at Channing Daughters is small in comparison to many of the other wineries that we had visited over the weekend. We walked in, grabbed glasses, and walked back out onto a back porch. It was still raining and still chilly, but all of that evaporated as soon as we started talking with the Winemaker, Christopher Tracy and the General Manager, Allison Dubin.

You meet plenty of people in the wine industry who know the ins and outs of the world of wine. It is a rare that you meet someone that is so enthusiastic about teaching others about wine (especially when it is their own wine) that the enthusiasm rubs off on you. Chris was not only knowledgeable, but he was so pleased to be able to share his visions and thoughts about wine with others interested in listening. He was a joy to taste with and a double pleasure because his wines were fantastic.

Chris makes twenty-three wines at Channing Daughters, fourteen of which are white, three roses, and six reds. What was most impressed me was the consistency from one wine to the next. All were wines I would gladly drink again (in fact I bought six bottles while I was there).

And there was so much diversity! There was crisp Chardonnay, oak integrated Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Field Blends, Tokai Friulano, Pinot Grigio, Blends of each white varietal with different levels of malolactic fermentation, Merlot, Blaufrankish (dude! Blaufrankish in Long Island!), and a wine combining the ripasso method and the solera method. It was fresh! It was fun! And the wines were damn good!

The best moment was when Chris gave us a look like that of a wicked child that had a hidden stash of candy and asked us if we wanted to stick our nose in his Madeira. Of course we had to say yes! He lead us through what was probably the smallest winery room I have ever seen (probably smaller than my apartment!) and into the back of the winery where there were barrels sitting. Barrels full of wine! Exposed to the elements! He lead us to a barrel left on its own between several rows of stacked barrels and pulled the plug from the bunghole. When my turn came around, I stuck my snozz in and there was no doubt, it was Madeira! When asked what grape it was, he said Merlot.

Chris showed us that experimentation is alive and well on Long Island, and his wines are all the better for it. Even more impressive is that the wines were moderately price and, in my opinion, worth every penny.

Thanks go to Lenn Thompson of LENNDEVOURS for putting together such a great weekend and showing wineries that bloggers are a valuable advocate in today's wine market.

TasteCamp East

Yesterday, TasteCamp East was announced on LENNDEVOURS and I am honored to be one of the participants. Living in New York City, I have wanted to get out to Long Island more often and this is the perfect excuse to take a mini vacation to do so.

I have tasted a few New York wines and I have worked with Bruce Schneider, the winemaker of Schneider Vineyards and consulting winemaker at Onabay (or at least I think that is what he is doing there), both of which hail from Long Island. They have been pleasant and interesting and a few Cabernet Francs have definitely made me pay attention.

TasteCamp was created by Lenn at LENNDEVOURS (I seem to mention him a lot lately) as well as fellow bloggers, including Melissa at Family, Love, Wine Blog; Erika at StrumErika; John at Anything Wine and Becky at Smells Like Grape. The idea behind TasteCamp is to have an event where bloggers can come together and meet other bloggers and taste wine with each other.

According to Lenn (and he should know) TasteCamp will happen as follows:

The festivities will start Friday, May 1 with a reception and dinner at Raphael, co-sponsored by Raphael and the Long Island Merlot Alliance. The plans are still forming, but it looks like we'll be the first to taste a couple single-vineyard Sauvignon Blancs from Raphael and also get a preview of LIMA's 2006 Merliance as part of a three-year vertical of that co-produced wine.

The plans for Saturday, May 2 are still coming together, but it looks like we'll be making visits to five different wineries, including lunch at Shinn Estate Vineyard, which will featured the wines of and be co-hosted by Shinn Estate Vineyards, Jamesport Vineyards and Macari Vineyards. After lunch, hopefully, in conjuntion with the Long Island Wine Council, we'll be able to taste the wines from wineries that we won't have time to visit.

Sunday May 3 we'll be shooting down to the South Fork of Long Island, aka the Hamptons, to visit Wolffer Estate and Channing Daughters Winery as well. For the beer lovers in the group, we may even stop off at Southampton Publick House on our way back west.

I am also excited about this because my girl Leah will be coming with me to taste through the wines. A big shout out to her for being on the cusp of finishing Med School and getting into New York Presbyterian for her residency!



Logo Credit: PJ Sedgwick created the TasteCamp EAST logo.