Terrapin virtual tasting set up for Jan. 28

Couple of note from Terrapin Station Winery in Cecil County, Md., near Elkton. They have scheduled a wine dinner at Agro Dolca restaurant at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 20. Cost is $55 per person. It's a five-course Prix Fixe menu paired with five wines from Terrapin Station. For details, go to the Terrapin Web site.

Have written on several occasions about the plans for a virtual tasting, the first that I'm aware of in this region. It has been scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28. And I'll steal the remainder of the commentary from the winery's latest e-letter.

"So what's a virtual wine tasting? Glad you asked!

Since our fans are located all over the state, we decided to steal an idea that Morris experienced once to enable people to try wines and talk about them online. This is how it will work:

1. You acquire the wine for the tasting at your local retail store so that you can taste along with the event. A complete listing of our stores can be found here. If your local store does not have the wine we plan to try, tell them to call us and we will make sure they have it for you. The wine we are tasting at this event will be our 2008 Cabernet Franc.

2. Before the tasting visit Talk Shoe. While it is not strictly necessary to set up a login account, it does make your experience better.

4. A few minutes before the show, login and join the show. During the show, we would taste and talk about a wine or wines while everyone online tried them along with us.

5. During the show you could ask or post questions or comments. If you use a telephone connection you will actually be able to speak and ask questions when the mic is open. Otherwise, you can always type your questions.

We ask in advance that you be patient as this is an experiment and frankly we'll be learning on the fly. A little genuine spontaneity isn't such a bad thing."

About that virtual tasting idea ... give Morris Zwick a call if you're interested in participating

Chatted with owner and winemaker Morris Zwick of Terrapin Station Winery in Elkton, Md., more than a week ago about a number of subjects, including the virtual tasting he'd like to try sometime this month.

Using a software called talkshoe, it would allow folks to interact with Zwick as they are all tasting the same wine. He said he's been a participant on a show for amateur winemakers that originates in the Pittsburgh area; that show sometimes goes as long as an hour and a half and involves a number of different folks dialed in to the site.

He's hoping to even get a dozen or so involved in the first attempt, go between a half-hour and 45 minutes, and then build it from there. His goal is to arrange the virtual tasting for mid-December.

"You know, even only have 10, 11, 12 people, I'd be perfectly happy with that," he said. "I think it's the kind of thing where people have got to try it and see it work, then they'll tell other people. Eventually, I can see also bringing people on to the show, maybe bring Kevin Atticks from the Maryland Wine Association or people from other wineries in Maryland . . . and so it would be a way to promote not only Terrapin Station Winery but other Maryland wines in general."

For those not familiar with Terrapin Station, it's the only producer of boxes wines that I know of in the region and it's distributing now through more than 60 outlets in Maryland. Zwick figures he'll just start with one wine, maybe their 2008 Cabernet Franc, one of two ones that Terrapin Station recently released. "Then they'll dial in at the appropriate time and while they're trying it, we're trying it, and people can ask questions," he said. "It gives them an opportunity to ask what we did with it and what some of the stats were like . . . gives them an opportunity to ask some of those specific questions and on top of that we can talk about why this vintage is the the way it is. For example, this [2008] vintage is a 14 percent alcohol wine, which is pretty high for the East Coast. It was a hot, hot August, September; we really got the sugars up and we decided instead of trying to [drop] it down we'd just take advantage of the situation and see what we got as long as we were down below, what's the magic number there, 14.5, and see what we get."

If you're interested in participating in this first virtual tasting that I'm aware of in the region, drop the Web site an e-mail or call 410.398.1875. The wine should list around $23 for a 1.5-liter box; obviously, the the equivalent of the two .750 ml. bottles that you're probably used to buying in your favorite state store or shop.

Zwick noted the one other thing he likes about talkshoe is that the program can be recorded. So if you miss it, you can still sample the wine later and read the comments. This idea, he said, just supplements the other ways of getting the word out: store tastings and festivals, to name a couple. "Our challenge is all about evangelism and getting people to try the stuff," he said. "Once they do, they're fine with it."

Terrapin Station considers virtual wine tasting

Let me post this and then try and hook up with the folks from Terrapin Station Winery in Elkton, Md., over the next few days to find out the story behind the story. Already one of the more innovative wineries in the mid-Atlantic area with its support of the Terrapin Institute and its line of boxed wines, owners Janet and Morris Zwick want to try a virtual wine tasting if they can find enough interested parties. Here's how it would work, based on what's in their e-letter.

We are considering holding a virtual, online tasting using the capabilities of Talk Shoe.


This is how it would work:

1. We would announce the date for the tasting and the wine(s) that would be tasted.

2. You would acquire the wines for the tasting so that you can taste along with the event.

3. We would set up a Talk Shoe show that you would log into.

4. During the show, we would taste and talk about a wine or wines while everyone online tried them along with us.

5. During the show you could ask or post questions or comments.

We would like to give it a try, but of course don't want to log in and listen to (virtual) crickets chirping. Therefore, please let us know what you think by answering the poll we have on our Facebook fan page or send us a note here. If there is enough interest, we'll announce a date and give it a whirl.

Terrapin Station excited about bronze in first foray into international competition

Some odds and ends on an oppressive Saturday:

Maryland's Terrapin Station Winery in Elkton is understandably proud for earning a bronze medal for its 2008 Cayuga in the Lone Star International Wine Competition. "We wanted to see how our wines would do against international competition," said the release. "The Lone Star competition liked our 2008 Cayuga, which makes sense since it appears to be the favorite wine of the 2008 vintage so far.

Two new red wines that will be released in the coming weeks from 2008: Terrapin Station's Shiraz and Cabernet Franc, according to its most recent e-letter. "The Shiraz is a fruit forward wine that we think folks will really enjoy as a pleasantly fruity, easy to drink red.The Cabernet Franc is a full-bodied red that boasts an unusually high alcohol (for an East Coast wine) of just over 14%. Both of these reds represent an evolution in our winemaking, and we think you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Terrapin Station is unique for two things: its Terrapin Institute and its wines in a box.

Terrapin, Kreutz Creek both plan vineyard days

Saw where a couple of regional wineries will hold vineyard days in the next couple of weeks. Terrapin Station Winery near Elkton, Md., in Cecil County, will be planting vines on Sunday, May 3. As they noted in their e-letter, the holes are already dug, so they just need to get the vines in the ground plus add stakes and shelters. If you have a desire to "get down and dirty" in the vineyard, send a note to volunteer@terrapinstationwinery.com to let them know if you can come help.

Meanwhile, more than a week earlier, Jim and Carole Kirkpatrick will welcome volunteers to assist in their vineyard day this Saturday, April 25, at Kreutz Creek Winery in West Grove, Pa. They will be planting several rows of Vidal Blanc and Petit Verdot. They're expecting the vines to arrive April 23, so those will have to go in the ground Saturday rain or shine. Fortunately, for them and anyone expecting to drop in to help, the long-range forecast calls for perfect weather to do anything, including planting vines, with sunny skies and temperatures in the mid to high 70s.

Carole said by phone the other day that they've been holding their vineyard days and other related "workdays" since they began; indeed, she said that's how the first vineyard got planted. It's a 9 to 5 day, with a break for lunch as Carol cooks up her famous vineyard burgers. Once they get everything planted later on in the afternoon, everyone can sit and relax and enjoy some wine.

These vines will replace, among other things, the winery's former award-winning Gewurztraminer. "Just every year we lost more and more and more of it, where I think we ended up with [only] eight or 12 cases the last time we made it," Carole said. "So we pulled it out. We’re over it." Take awhile to get over the disappointment, she was asked? "You know, it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't something that Jim really excelled in making. But there's nothing you can do. You can't keep wasting money trying to spray them and take care of them for a couple of cases."

They've had as many as 35 for vineyard day and the other events they've held on various weekends and holidays, although some openings remain for this weekend's planting. Anyone who attends should dress for the weather and dress to get dirty; there's no hiding from either. Carole said they are planning a bottling day on Memorial Day with the same schedule and enticements (burgers and wine). They are also scheduling "workdays" in June and July, and of course everyone's invited in the fall to assist with harvest.

Carole said she jokes with visitors to the tasting room about the opportunities. "There are wineries in California where people pay to come and work for the weekend. So I always tease people: [You know], other people pay to do this," she said, starting to laugh. "We're letting you do this."

Terrapin releases put on Friday's schedule

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Terrapin Station Winery will unveil this year's versions of two of last year's best-selling wines later this week: the 2007 Cecil Red and 2008 Traminette Reserve.

Janet and Morris Zwick, proprietors of the Elkton County winery in Maryland, said they would be celebrating the release of the Traminette on Friday at Cherry Hill Liquors at 8 p.m. That's a couple of hours after a tasting at Gilly's in Rockville. Other tasting dates are planned for a number of dates in May. All will be posted on the Web site of the winery, unique for its packaging in a box.

Three more wines are also on the way: Vidal Blanc, Cayuga, and Five Rivers Rose', a new varietal. Terrapin Station has plans to build a tasting room, but for now has depended on a network of stores to sell its product.

Morris has been more than accommodating to talk about winemaking and his wines any time I call. For that, I'm happy to get out the word about these releases.

Tamanend's boxed series at 40 pct. of sales

While Terrapin Station in Maryland's Cecil County has gotten most of the love on this blog for its boxed wines, it's not the only winery in the region that has gotten away from the bottle and cork.

Tamanend Winery is in its first year and located in Lancaster, near routes 72 and 741. It's selling its dry wines in a bottle and its sweeter wines, with just a couple of exceptions, in 1.5-liter and 3-liter bag in a box. There are two exceptions to this dry bottle and sweet bag universe: its Port-style and an off-dry Reisling (called Irresistible) that are both bottled.

Co-owner Richard Carey said by phone earlier Tuesday that the boxed wines have been a significant amount of the new winery's business, around 40 percent. They're also applied to the Liquor Control Board to sell the boxed wines in Pennsylvania's state stores. A response to that application is still pending.

At some point, Carey said, they'll look at the numbers entering the winery and make a decision about extending their hours, which run from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays. "This being our first year in this location where we're open to the consuming public, we don't know exactly what this drill is going to be," Carey said, noting that "from a business standpoint we're accelerating rapidly so we know there are thing in store. We just don't know what it is yet."

Off their Web site, it appears they could get help from associations with two trails. They note that they have just become a member of Uncork York, which recently completed a highly successful fourth installment of Tours de Tanks. Members of Uncork run from east of the Susquehanna River to west of Gettysburg. The site also indicated that Carey and partner Linda Jones McKee are working with other wineries in and around Lancaster to form a Red Rose Wine Trail. Details on both no doubt will be forthcoming in the next few months.

Additions to the events schedule

Terrapin Station Winery, located a few miles north of Elkton, Md., sent out a note Thursday about several tastings its doing this weekend.
Friday: 4:30 - 7:30 p.m.. Upcounty Fine Wine Clarksburg, Md.
Saturday: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., State Line Liquors, Elkton, Md.
Saturday: 1 - 5 p.m., House of Liquors Westminster, Md.

And then there's this sale just announced at Manatawny Creek Winery in Douglassville, Pa. Winemaker and proprietor Joanne Levengood wrote in an e-blast: We are finding it hard to find space in the cellar for newly bottled wine! So, in order to make some room, this coming weekend, April 3rd through April 5th, we are having an end-of-the-winter Winter Warmth sale. Our spiced, sweet, red Winter Warmth wine will be on sale for 20% off per bottle. Additional 10% off case prices apply! To show you how Winter Warmth can be enjoyed cold in warmer weather, we’ll have some Winter Warmth Spritzers on hand for everyone to try.

At Elkton shop, 25 Md. wines and counting

Greg Birney said he was 7 when his family opened Cherry Hill Liquors in Elkton, Md. He learned all aspects of the business, from stocking shelves to sweeping the floors. And by the time he graduated high school and took over the shop in 2002, he had a pretty good idea of what he needed to set his store apart. Something unique. A niche product. And carrying Maryland wines turned out to be that element of his inventory that other stores didn't have; today he carries around 150 of them.

I had visited a lot of liquor stores in the area and really nothing to me set them apart,” he said by phone last week. “I'd find the same product sets at each liquor store. So my thinking was, 'What am I going to find, what am I going to do, what kind of services or products can I offer my customers to draw form a larger customer base? Because otherwise it was just going to be a neighborhood shop; not that there was anything wrong with that, but I wanted something more. And that's when I stumbled into [Maryland wines], in early 2003, that's when I started rolling with them. And at that point there were only 12 Maryland wineries, and it was easy. Now there are into the 20s that actually selling to retailers; I believe we're around 25, 26, and I just made contact with another one today [Bordeleau] that I'll probably be picking up later in the week.”

Birney's name came by way of Morris Zwick, owner of nearby Terrapin Station Winery. What prompted the call was a question about how difficult he found it to sell Zwick's wines in a box, a concept foreign to regional wineries but not so much any more nationally or internationally. The winter edition of Pennsyvania Wine & Spirits devoted a story to the subject. Writer Anne Taulane noted that in Pennsylvania over the past 52 weeks, sales of alternative wine boxes (three-liter, one-liter, and 500-milliliter wines) were up 35.9 percent. Zwick packages his product in 1 ½-liter boxes, the equivalent of two bottles of wine.

Boxed wines, Birney said, have kind of a negative connotation in the industry, especially on the retail side of things. “But Morris and Janet [Zwick] have really worked to put quality wines into their final product. One of his goals, and this is something I have to explain to consumers or potential customers of his [is that this] is one of his personal goals, one of their goals at the winery, is to have a lower carbon footprint. So they want to be as environmentally responsible as possible. To answer your question, it's one customer at a time, explaining that concept. Being the closest liquor store to their winery, it's been a lot easier doing that. I don't know how other stores have fared, say 10 or 20 miles from here, because they're not next door. But a lot of people have seen the winery, seen the grapes go in and wanna try it, and they're very curious, and generally speaking there are a lot of repeat customers on it.”

He charges $22 per box for the wines, explaining that it's in line with other wineries “when you break it down because you have two bottles in each box. When you break it down,” Birney said, “and explain to a consumer that, hey, there's a liter and a half of wine in there, that means it's comparable pricewise to $11 or $12 a bottle. And when you explain that, they're more agreeable to it.”

The two questions most often posed? Birney said one is why Terrapin Station has decided to package their wines in a box. And the second has to do with the names of the wines -- Vidal Blanc, Traminette, Cecil Red, Cecil White. It's a similar situation, though not quite as extreme, to the names that Anthony Vietri uses for his Va La Vineyards wines in Avon Grove, Pa. “They don't recognize Vidal Blanc; they recognize Chardonnay,” Birney said. “It's explaining to a customer what Vidal Blanc is, explaining how it tastes, that's kind of a secondary questions is what is this grape.”

It's that willingness to answer questions and sell the product that ranks Birney's liquor shop high on Zwick's list of favorites from among the more than 40 outlets that carry his product. For now, that's the only way you can buy Terrapin Station Wines, although Zwick said last week that they are planning to erect a tent by the winery for a couple of months this summer and, besides selling it, allow customers to taste some of them. While that happens, he said, he'll evaluate what shops his wines are going into now and how they're doing.

“We’re probably going to have to ruminate on the mix of stores that we have,” Zwick said. “Some do pretty well in terms of moving product and others don’t. It's just a matter if you’re a small winery producing local product, you’re generally going to be attracting people interested in wine to begin with beyond getting bulk 1 ½ liters bottles of wine from California or something. So some stores, they just don't push much premium wine and, of course, right now, in particular. And so when we're placed in a store where they're moving a lot of lower-priced, lower-value wines and beers, that's just not a successful place for us to be. So we'll keep evaluating our mix of stores.”

Next up: Port in a box and a 'roadside' tent

Sometimes the longer the interview the longer it takes to post. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it, for why part of this Presidents Day chat with Morris Zwick of (yeah, we can call them funky) Terrapin Station Winery that's located just north of Elkton, Md., in Cecil County has taken so long to transcribe and give it some eyes beyond mine.

The word “fun” jumps out at you on his site, and that sense of humor shines through in any interview with this second-generation Italian who notes on his Web site that he was a rare bird among his peers at the University of Maryland, where wine was his drink of choice. Starting with kits, his move toward winemaking now includes a product that is the only one in the Pennsylvania/Maryland region that packages it in a bag and box. It's sold in more than 40 stores, including now in Beltway Fine Wine & Spirits in Towson. “That's actually a big deal for us,” he said. “It's a large store, they move a lot of volume, and there's a lot of people go there to shop.”

As of now there's nowhere to buy his wines on his property, but Zwick said that will change soon. He figures to put up a festival tent by the wine building and open on weekends and maybe a couple of weekdays from June through mid-August. There they can allow visitors to taste and purchase the wines. “It's just to get people to stop by, see the place and sell some retail. We have some longer-term plans to put up some permanent structures, but those are on hold until several things happen “ he said, stopping to laugh, “including the improvement of the economy.”

Not only would the weather prohibit them from doing that now, but so would the inventory. Zwick said they're down to two Vidals and the Syrah, but that they plan to package five in the next few weeks. “We're just waiting for the guy who makes our cardboard to finish, and once he’s done with that we’ll start getting em knocked out one by one.”

Those include a Cecil Red, a blend of Cabernet Franc and Shiraz, their reserve Traminette, Vidal, Cayuga and what he called Five Rivers Rose. “And then, when those five wines are done, we have last year’s reds in the tank. We also have a Port we’re playing with and, with the port, we’ve come to an agreement to do a little marketing with it that people should find entertaining and useful. So we’ll see how that works out. I think it will be the world’s first Port in a box. We’ll see. It’s a matter of convenience for us. You know, we’ve got our form factory, we might as well keep it.”

He can only hope all of these sell with the same zest as his Traminette, which has been overwhelmingly popular.

“Last year we sold it out in five weeks. Now, we didn’t have a huge amount, but I was actually pleasantly surprised and I think part of it is. We don't don't it horribly sweet, but it does have some residual sugar. And its parent Gewurtztraminer is definitely a love or hate wine because [it] has definitely a very, strong, unique characteristics, a spiciness to it. Some people like it, some people hate it. The Traminette, being a cross of it, it has those characterictics but it’s not so overwhelming and I actually think it makes a more pleasant wine to drink. So I think part of it is that Traminette such an approachable white wine and it’s unique. It’s not just another Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc or something like this. And it was really popular, so we're hoping to keep with it.”

He said they handled the approach on this current vintage a little differently; for instance, doing an extended cold soak on it for 48 hours. “We definitely got something even more flavorful than last year, so we’re pretty excited about it. One thing you should always talk to a winemaker about, I think, is what kind of wines are you drinking. Because if you’re only drinking your own wines, drinking the same things all the time, then you’re not learning. And we definitely started to, and it’s hard to find, it’s not like every store [sells] a Traminette. But we definitely have been going around trying Traminettes and getting ideas from people and I think that will be reflected in what comes out here.”

Perhaps one other significant change at the winery will be some new packaging to differentiate their product line. Zwick said the higher-end wines will have a variation on the existing box and the newer wines will have a slightly different box style. It's one of our goals to be able to have somebody to look at the wines,” and recognize the gradations of value and price points. “Everything right now is priced the same. Our quote-unquote suggested retail is 20 bucks; that’s what we sell at festivals and stuff. When we’re done this little phase we’ll probably be anywhere from $18 to $30. The Traminette will probably be around 30 bucks . Now part of this is the mission work of explaining to people before they take a step back and say 'Wow, that’s a lot of money,' is remember the boxes containing the equivalent of two bottles of wine in it.”