At Twin Brook, another harvest is over

Passing along my sincere thanks to winemaker Jason Price at Twin Brook Winery in Gap, Pa. He was kind enough to respond to a question about what’s going at his winery.

He wrote: “harvest is officially over. cab sauv was picked on wed and that emptiedthe vineyard. the frost sunday into monday turned all the leaves brown and that pretty much means pick what remains. luckily cab franc was ripe andready, so we got all the franc off on monday. we would have wanted to leave sauv on a bit longer, but nature dictated the schedule. fortunately the sauv fruit was acceptable and with some fastidious winemaking we will be ableto produce an excellent sauv for 2008. we looked ahead and did a green harvest in august, so that helped. also, with bleeding and other tricks we should get the hearty sauv we all love to drink. overall, 2008 was challenging. a lot of rain meant worrisome sleep and extended hours. the early cold forced us to pick the cabs a little early. but believe it or not, I am more excited about the 2008 wines than the 2007. there is a little more challenge, but so far the fruit has produced some awesome early wines. i just racked the 08 vignoles the other day and the whole place smelled of tropical fruits. good enough for me."

A few notes from Sand Castle Winery

Let me post these entries from the newsletter of Sand Castle Winery in Erwinna, Pa., a member of the Bucks County Wine Trail.

* Pinot Noir was harvested after foggy mornings and dry sunny days and it is showing its superior quality in the freshly made wine. Chardonnay harvest was like a dream. The grapes falling off the stems with minimum shaking during the harvest with the mechanical harvester. Riesling held its own until October and we will have great Late Harvest. We will finish harvest of Cabernet Sauvignon this week and the vineyards will start a new season with pruning, tying, hedging, cultivating etc.

* We just finished harvest. Come and help yourself. You are welcome to pick grapes which are left in vineyard and make yourself the Late Late Harvest wine.

* Sand Castle will have a kiosk this holiday season at Montgomery Mall in North Wales, PA . We will be centrally located on the first floor. Look for the Sand Castle Banner. Stop by and taste our famous hot Alpine Spice Wine.

* Route 32 River Road will be open Friday, Oct. 25 and FINALLY you can go from the
winery north on Rt. 32 to Rt. 611 and vise versa!

* What wine should you serve with Thanksgiving dinner? This is a popular question this time of the year. Let’s break down what makes up a typical Thanksgiving Dinner: some appetizers before dinner, turkey both white and dark meat, gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, bread stuffing, squash, and dessert.

Before dinner to accompany appetizers two wines work very well Sand Castle Classic Chardonnay, for the dry wine lovers and Sand Castle Cuvee Blush, for the semi-sweet wine drinkers. Both wines do not over power appetizers and will stimulate the taste buds. Also both wines are medium in body; the last thing that is needed is a big red, with such a filling dinner planned.

The perfect wine for dinner would be Sand Castle Pinot Noir, most wines do not have the ability to accompany such a variation of flavors presented at a Thanksgiving dinner. The wine must be
able to pair with turkey that is not overly powerful, gravy that is rich and fatty, dressing that is powerful with loads of herbs, cranberry sauce that is sharp tangy. Pinot Noir does all that and
remember when your drink wine with food the wine does not taste as dry as when you drink wine without food.

Sand Castle Late Harvest Johannisburg Riesling is the wine to complete the perfect meal. It pairs wonderfully with sweet desserts be it pumpkin pie, rich chocolate or cream covered
dishes. We hope your holiday is a wonderful and thankful event.

Pa. sets sites for Beaujolais tastings Nov. 20

One of my favorite times of the wine calendar, the middle of November when the first wine of the new season is released, is celebrated in a number of ways across the region. Beaujolais Nouveau Day officially comes around the third Thursday in November and it's a chance to see and taste what was ust on the vine five or six weeks ago.

Several wineries and trails, such as the Bucks County Wine Trail, celebrate a Nouveau Release, just in time for the holiodays. Personally, there's nothing that adds as much to the Thanksgiving table than a few bottles of Beaujolais . . . oh, except maybe for that apple pie that follows two hours later.

The folks who run the state stores in Pennsylvania have also gotten on board, and who can blame them. Among the first of the French Boujolias tastings, free to the public, will occur on Nov. 20 in three locations:

* in Harrisburg, at the Harrisburg Hilton, One North Second St., from 5 to 7 p.m.

* in Philly, at the Sofitel Philadelphia, 107 S. 17th St., from 5 to 7 p.m.

* and in Pittsburgh, at the Renaissance Hotel, 107 Sixth St., from 5 to 7 p.m.

Serendipity, indeed, at Loew Vineyards

Based on the number of wineries in the vicinity of Mt. Airy, Md., you might think that you’re somewhere in the middle of Napa instead of eastern Frederick County.

There are four located to the north and south of Maryland Route 26, all members of the Frederick Wine Trail and all within a 10- or 15-minute drive from each other. One is Loew Vineyards, owned by Bill and wife Lois, who bought their 37-acre farm and planted their first vines in 1982. By 1986, they were bottling their first wine.

In all, they produce 17 wines, a combination of appealing to varied palates and Bill’s candidly admitting that “whenever I come up with a new wine my wife wouldn’t let me terminate any other wines.” They offer types that most would recognize: a Caernet, Riesling and Chardonnay. And others called Celebration, Twilight and Classic Red that virtually no one would recognize without a bit of an introduction. But Bill said last night that he doesn’t think unfamiliarity is such a bad thing. “You know, people do like something different to taste and to take home rather than the stuff they recognize,” he said. “So we have different wines.” One is called Country Classic that, he said, “is a very nice red wine blended with blackberries. It’s a delightful drink. I came up with that wine five or six years ago, and it has been very successful.”

So have what he calls his two signature wines, one called Serendipity and the other called Raspberry in Grape. Serendipity is made out of a grape called Reliance, which is seedless and pink when fully mature. Released in Arkansas in 1982, Bill Loew said he was communicating with the grape’s developer the following year. “You know, I got maybe like 30 vines at that time and I planted it and, I tell you, after three years we had really nice grapes. That grapes was so wonderful by itself that I just had to make some wine out of it. Since that time I’ve planted more than an acre of that grape . . . it really has a lovely taste . . . a grapefruit aftertone and maybe some melon. Very nice, very palatable. Just nice sipping wine.”

That’s what he also calls the Raspberry in Grape, which blends Vidal Blanc with raspberries into a sweet and tasty mix.”

Meanwhile, what was a “count-em-on-one-hand group” of wineries for many years has turned blossomed into a list in the mid 30s across Maryland. Yet it doesn’t seem to be crimping business. A ride down to Black Ankle Winery a couple Saturdays ago, for instance, took us past Elk Run Vineyards, which at a glance appeared quite crowded. A couple miles away, the same was the case as just-opened Black Ankle.

“I attend two wine festivals,” Bill said, “and of course when we started we had like seven or eight wineries. All of a sudden [that has] mushroomed to 22 wineries at one wine festival. So, yes, we do have more competition and I suppose things will kind of adjust itself as it goes along. I cannot tell you with any prediction how things will end, but so far it’s working pretty well.”

Black Walnut plowing toward opening

Posted a story last month on Black Walnut Winery in Sadburyville, Chester County, a hop, skip and a jump off Route 30 as it heads east onto the bypass toward Coatesville and Downingtown.

Co-owner Lance Castle talked then about opening in a month or so. Well, that month flew by in a blur, as it usually does for anyone trying to tie all the final loose ends and open the doors. Castle said earlier today that the opening “probably is going to be closer to mid- to late December than late November, which is what I was hoping for.”

Castle said he just received approval on all of his labels and brought them to the printer last Friday. Meanwhile, the last bit of work continues on his 198-year-old bank barn that will serve as the tasting room. “We put in an underfloor,” Castle said, “to support it up. It was an antique shop and a residence, so they wanted us to bring the grade of the building up . . . so we had to rip out the old floor and put in a new sub-floor. And I have to put in the new tongue and groove floor and get it sanded and finished. But the ceilings are done, the walls are done … the fireplace is almost all stripped and ready to go. So I’ve made a lot of progress.”

Once it open, the winery will become the seventh member of the Brandywine Valley Wine Trail, which recently completed its Harvest Fest Celebration and now turns its attention toward the annual Vintners’ Dinner Celebration on Saturday night, Nov. 8, at Longwood Gardens.

The view from NY: Biz booming this fall

Saw these two items in the weekly New York e-letter and thought I'd share them. From what I've seen, business indeed does seem to be good at most wineries despite the economy, although we'll see over the next couple of weeks if we can't get more concrete evidence of that.

2008 GRAPE HARVEST is moving right along, with another week of cooperative weather ripening the grapes so vineyard crews and winemakers can get them into presses, tanks and barrels. Cornell Cooperative Extension’s weekly “Veraison to Harvest” e-letter reported basically good news from all regions of the state in terms of both quantity and quality. Cash registers also are humming along, according to several winery owners I spoke with this week, with Columbus Day weekend bringing record visitors and sales to some despite (or maybe because of) the country’s dreary financial climate. The harvest should be pretty much over by Halloween except on Long Island where some of the late-ripening red varieties are left hanging into November.

FRESH TABLE GRAPES are a very small and fleeting but delightful part of our industry, and the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle did a great job reminding people of the tasteful treats all around them this time of year. As with wine grapes, New York grows a wide variety of table grapes—some seeded like Concord, Catawba and Niagara and others seedless like Himrod, Marquis and Vanessa which were developed by Cornell University scientist Bruce Reisch. They are truly nature’s candy: sweet and tempting, but with natural sugar and other substances that are good for you. Since supply is limited, many of the grapes are available only at U-pick farms and roadside farmers’ markets, but they’re definitely worth seeking out. The same edition of the paper had a great article about the many wineries which will soon host winemakers’ dinners to celebrate the end of the harvest.

The Event Grapevine: Oct. 17-19

Sugarloaf Winery, Dickerson, Md.
Grape Stomp
Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.

One of the great joys of updating this blog is having the excuse to call Jim McKenna, co-owner of Sugarloaf Mountain Vineyard in Dickerson, Md. There isn’t a story he hasn’t seen fit to tell, including where he got the idea for the Grape Stomp, which will be held for the second time this weekend at his Frederick County winery after a successful debut last year.

“My wife and I used to own a house down in Virginia, in the northern neck of Virginia,” he said the other day, “and a guy down there who’s a heck of a promoter put in a vineyard and he had a stomp and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really sounds kind of cool, and it went over very, very well. Bill Westbrook, I think his name is. . . . He was up in New York and he was a real maker and a shaker, but he loved it down in northern neck, and in this little town, and so he decided he’d put in this vineyard. He didn’t build a winery. Not yet anyway. He may some day. And he had this stomp and I thought, now, the reason why I thought it would be a success is because he actually pulled a Tom Sawyer on the townsfolk. You have to guess what he did. His place is called White Fences, and he literally managed to snooker about 60 people to come in and to pay 10 dollars apiece to have the privilege of painting his fence, and they came in. And I thought, if this guy can pull this thing off, then he knows what he’s doing. So I followed his lead on the stomp . . . we decided to go ahead and do it, and we really were playing it off the seat of our pants, and we got a couple of bands, one on a Saturday and one on a Sunday, and then we stole the idea of how to try to do this thing. We took half a barrel, three half-barrels, and put them up on a platform. Now we didn’t get as elaborate as he did; I mean he got the thing to be on springs and do all sorts of stuff. But we decided that could just simply put it on tilt and we could have little contests.

So we put them up on the platform and we have the three half-barrels and we have a little contest of 30 seconds you stomp away, and I play the tarantella, cause I kind of like that … dat-da-dat-da-dat-da-da . . . that kind of thing . . . I have a little boombox, and they really got into it. Mostly it was little kids and women of any age. The men they’re too machismo, nahhh, that’s beneath their dignity. But the women loved it and so when the band takes a break for about 20 minutes or a half-hour, I have a bullhorn and I say whatever comes into my head and get them going. And whoever gets the most juice out of the there gets a free glass of wine. And if it’s a kid we give them a chocolate bar or something like that. And so it’s been a great attraction. We had had about a thousand people or more last years and we expect maybe twice as many this year. We’ve had a lot of interest.”

McKenna said the grapes of choice for the stomp are brought in from other vineyards; last year they were a mix of 60 percent Chambourcin from Pennsylvania and 40 percent Cabernet Sauvignon from Virginia. And, no, the juice did not go into a bottle, although indirectly the stomp provided the impetus for a new wine by the same name.

“We weren’t searching out the finest wine grapes,” McKenna said, continuing his story. We were looking to find something that people would go stomping on. But the funny part of it is, once we finished with the stomp after the two days . . . we had all these grapes left over, and we said, ‘Well, what are we going to do with them?’ And decided, let’s make some wine. That’s the Stomp wine. Now some people look at you kind of funny and think, ‘Am I drinking wine that somebody’s feet have been on?’ And we have to tell them, ‘No, no, no, don’t be worried about that.’ It’s regular grapes that were left over and then we put a lot of sugar in it. Let me just tell you. It’s our fun wine, but it sells.”

One other note. The winery has been looking for volunteers to work the stomp, essentially pouring wine samples. For doing that, you would receive free admission, a complimentary bottle of Sugarloaf Mountain Vineyard wine, and a chance to hear Jim orchestrate the tarantella. In other words, a pretty doggone good time. Training is provided. Contact Kathy O'Donoghue at ksodonoghue@aol.com or 30.-365.5044 or call Sugarloaf Mountain Vineyard at 301.605.0130.

As for what else is on the docket this weekend, take a look:

PENNSYLVANIA WINERIES

Adams County Winery, Ortanna: Saturday, home winemaking class with John, the vintner; 1 to 3 p.m., tuition is $25 and reservations are required. You’ll learn tricks of the trade and how to get the best product from a kit, http://www.adamscountywinery.com/

Amore Vnieyards, Bath: Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, www.amore-4u.com

Big Creek Vineyard, Kunkletown: Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, www.bigcreekvineyard.com

Blue Mountain Vineyards, New Tripoli: Fall Foliage Tasting ($$), Sunday, 2 to 5 p.m.; Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, http://www.bluemountainwine.com

Chaddsford Winery, Chaddsford: Reserve tastings ($$), Saturday, sittings at 1, 2:30 and 4 p.m., Spiced Apple Sundays ($$), Oct. 19 and 25, noon to 5 p.m., picnic on the grounds, music from 2 to 5 p.m., tours and tastings, fee is for hot mulled wine tastings; Wine 101: The Basics ($$), Thursday, Oct. 23, 7 to 9 p.m., learn how to taste, how to identify basic wine types & styles and how to order and buy the wines you like successfully and confidently. Reservations at 610.388.6221, http://www.chaddsford.com

Cherry Valley Vineyards, Saylorsburg: Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, http://www.cherryvalleyvineyards.com/

Clover Hill, Breinigsville: Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., wine pairings and cooking demonstrations, www.cloverhillwinery.com

Clover Mill Farm Vineyards & Winery, Chester Springs: Open again, Sundays, 1 to 5 p.m., http://www.clovermillfarm.com/

Country Creek Winery, Telford: Country Creek Winery in the Barn, Saturday, 6 to 9 p.m., the Britton Brothers, http://www.countrycreekwinery.com/

Crossing Vineyards & Winery, Washington Crossing: Wine Tasting for Singles ($$), Friday, 7 to 9 p.m.; Wine Tasting for Dummies ($$), Sunday, 2 p.m.; Harvest Winemaker’s Dinner ($$), Saturday, Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m., five-course dinner with Crossing’s award-winning reds, http://www.crossingvineyards.com

Hauser Estate Winery, Biglerville: New winery open, Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., http://www.hauserestate.com/

Franklin Hill Vineyards, Bangor: Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, http://franklinhillvineyards.com/

Galen Glen Vineyard & Winery, Andreas: Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, http://www.galenglen.com

Moon Dancer Vineyards & Winery, Wrightsville: Music Friday (6 to 9 p.m.) and Sunday, 2 to 5 p.m.; Meet the Artist Reception, Saturday, 2 to 5 p.m., Jim Sullenberger, with original music by A.D. Chandler and his Imaginary Band, http://www.moondancerwinery.com
Mount Hope Estate and Winery, Manheim: Annual Mount Hope Wine Sale, 25 percent discount mix and match, goes through the end of October, http://www.parenfaire.com/

Naylor Wine Cellars, Stewartstown: Home for the Holidays dinner ($$), Saturday, Nov. 8, 3 to 6 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 9, 2 to 5 p.m., reservations required, http://www.naylorwine.com/

Pinnacle Ridge, Kutztown: Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, www.pinridge.com

Sand Castle Winery, Erwinna: Harvest Festival, Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Cabot Cheese will be there Saturday, noon to 4 p.m., for wine and cheese pairings, cellar tours, $5, tastings of nine wines, $5, you can also be there as they crush the Cabernet grapes, see how that’s done and be afford ed a taste, www.SANDCASTLEWINERY.COM

Vynecrest Winery, Breinigsville: Chambourcin Weekend on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, Saturday and Sunday, http://www.vynecrest.com

Va La Vineyards, Avondale: The Last Little Vineyard Concert of the Summer, Saturday, Far Cat Bar B Q, The Fat Cat Jazz Trio, open 12:01 to 5:54 p.m. Saturday and Sundays (no, this is not a misprint), www.valavineyards.com


MARYLAND WINERIES

Black Ankle Winery, Mt. Airy: Open for business, winner of Maryland Governor’s Cup in 2008; hours: Wednesday - Friday: noon to 5 p.m., Saturday: noon to 6 p.m., Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., information on winery at this link

Linganore Wine Cellars, Mt. Airy: Vintage Jazz Wine Festival ($$), Saturday and Sunday, information at this link

Other MARYLAND winery events can be found at this link, VIRGINIA events at this link and New York events at this link

FESTIVALS

Shrewsbury Fall Fest, Shrewsbury, Pa., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Shrewsbury Historic Village, Seven Valleys Vineyard & Winery will be offering tastings and light appetizers in their Shrewsbury shop, information at this link

Autumn Wine Festival ($$), Salisbury, Md., Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday, 12:30 to 6 p.m., $20 in advance, $25 at the gate, includes glass and tastings, information at this link


$$ – Admission charge