Easy does it for Pinot Noir at Moondancer

Caught up during the middle of the week with Jim Miller, winemaker and owner of Moondancer Vineyards & Winery in Wrightsville, Pa., and broached the idea of talking about a special bottling he had mentioned to me in a previous conversation of a wine he called Driagra.

Nothing wrong with the wine, Miller noted, but not what he'd call one of his signature products. "That’s not a typical wine for us," he said, then continued, "Our specialty really is a premium dry red. That’s what we really focus on. You know we do other wines and we do a nice job with dry whites, but we focus really on more of a European dry style wine, something that would be more typical of a winery in California or a winery in Europe, not necessarily what you’re typically finding on the East Coast."

Located no more than a 10-minute ride off the Wrightsville exit of Route 30, half the fun is winding up the driveway and taking in the spectacular view of the Susquehanna River as it makes its way south toward Peach Bottom and the Chesapeake Bay. While the entire plot covers a bit more than 30 acres, Miller said about 12 acres are planted with eight varieties of grapes: Chardonnary, Pinot Grigio, Riesling, Cab Sauv, Cab Franc, Merlot, Syrah and Pinot Noir.

"The oldest part of the vineyard is 10 years old," Miller said, "so the wines are really starting to develop nicely."

One in particular is the Pinot Noir, which just won a double gold in the dry red category at the Keystone Wine Competition that was held in Cromwell, Conn., on March 1.

"I don’t really put the wines in many competitions simply because I don’t have the time and we miss the deadlines, but once in awhile we’ll put them in there and we’ve always done well with our reds and our dryer whites," said Miller, who spent the last weekend showing off his collection of wines at the Tastes of PA Wine & Food Festival at Split Rock Resort. "At Split Rock, I think we were one of the only wineries to take [Pinot Noir] up there. I think other wineries make it; in fact, I know they do, but we took it and a lot of people were amazed that you could even grow that grape here, and it actually does pretty well."

Primarily a grape you see on the West Coast in northern California and up into Oregon and Washington, it can be difficult to master on the East Coast because it ripens earlier than most reds, a process called verasion. "So the birds immediately flock to the Pinot Noir," Miller said. "It almost goes from green to black, and that attracts the birds even though they aren’t ripe, so the birds will get after it if you don’t net it right away. So you have to net it, you have to protect it from the birds early in the season, which is just one more management step in the vineyard, which can be difficult."

It's also grows in a tighter cluster than most, he noted, meaning it’s more susceptible to disease pressure. "When that cluster closes you can’t get spray around the berries," he said.

Still, he said, the wine has increasingly developed more characteristics as it heads toward another harvest. "The third year you get a little bit of fruit," he said. "The fourth year you get almost a full crop, but it’s about that fifth or sixth year where it starts to comes into its own , and . . . this harvest will be eight years. But is a difficult grape to grow. You don’t get a huge yield out of it."

That yield will come out of six barrels this year, filling about 150 cases, Miller said, then without a pause added, "We’ll drink half of those and sell the other half."

Cheers to that.