People often ask me what I do to keep so thin. Part of it is my daily swim. Part of it is the physical activity that goes with working in a vineyard, winery, and farm. But a big part of it is my diet.
In the early 1990s with little responsibility aside from a full-time job, I somehow became a nationally ranked triathlete. That followed high school cross country which preceded cycling in college.
I’ve always been fit. When I raced, I found my sweet spot to be in the mid-1980s with a 6’4″ frame. When I backed off training to focus on the winery in the late 1990s, my weight shot up to the high 190’s then capped at about 205. When I traveled in the corporate world, by 2009, I shot up to nearly 230. Though not so heft by today’s standards with my height, when my fit physician said that I, I, me, had to lose some weight and that I, me, may need blood pressure medication, I was insulted! Already on allergy medication, I decided I would “show up” to that doctor. That was June 2009. By Thanksgiving 2009, I just with a simple increase in exercise, I dropped 2 pounds. Yes, 2….2, not 22, or 12, but 2, just 2 stinkin’ pounds! I was furious! Pass me the chips! I just need more exercise!
Then a friend of mine challenged me to weight loss. Then I remembered those customers telling me that they could drink our sweeter wines and they were diabetic. Then I remembered my triathlon training diet of 40% carbs, 40% protein, and 30% fat. Then I remembered the lack of processed foods in that diet. Could going natural do things for me? What is diabetes and is it a new phenomenon or something we’ve been dealing with for centuries? How does the body process sugars, and are all sugars alike? How do artificial sweeteners affect our bodies and subconscious responses?
To keep this story from going on too long, I delved into all things about modern diseases, food history, modern foods, previous health habits, compared to today’s health habits, etc. Many books were read, such as The China Study, building a foundation for more research. The additional research from the book Missing Microbes, by Martin Blaser, about the over-consumption of antibiotics, pretty well set me sailing. Below is a diet I carefully constructed, re-constructed, fact-checked, double-fact-checked, and ran by a whole host of folks.
Today, I swim 5-6 days a week and run the other 2. I don’t overdo it, though I do lots of interval work in the pool. I drink wine daily. My blood is absolutely perfect, and I take no medications, including no allergy medicines. My body fat is around 7% and I am back in the mid-180’s. You can do it. It takes time, but this diet works because it feeds the body what it needs, or at least what mine needs. If there is any change I am looking at, it is reducing the number of carbs. And best of all, I have lost the craving for fast food, processed foods, and all that.
I also take zero vitamins and zero supplements.
I wrote this diet for my swim team.
Peak Performance Diet – Jim Pfeiffer
For: My High School Swim Team
“Ninety percent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.” – Victor Lindlahr in 1923
In 1958 less than 1% of the US population had Type 2 Diabetes. It is estimated that by 2020, more than 25% will- Center for Disease Control
Eat Natural Foods: Absolutely!!! Research from Washington University St. Louis ties natural food consumption to healthy gut microbial activity to a very healthy human body, eliminating many of the causes of today’s bad health. http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/25786.aspx
Diet Soda Anyone? NO!! Just drinking one diet drink a day was enough to create a significantly heightened chance of developing one of these disorders, the researchers found.
Artificial sweeteners were also shown to activate different patterns in the brain’s pleasure centers that normally correspond to sweet tastes. This may mean that these products do not satisfy our sweet tooth as much as natural sugar. One study found that non-caloric sweeteners made animals eat increased amounts of calorie-rich sweet tasting food.
Is Honey mixed with Water Perhaps the Ultimate Sports Energy Drink? And Workout Recovery Drink? Here is an interesting article to read about the positive effects of honey.
The dangers of simple carbohydrates. Are they natural? Hmmm… The above article also slams aspartame very, very hard. Lots of diseases are listed from the overconsumption of simple sugars and aspartame.
Here’s something to think about. Did you know that if you increase the amount of protein in your diet, the cravings for sugary items will diminish?
Successful Diet to Increase Energy, Speed, Endurance, and Decrease Recovery Time. The Zone Diet 40/30/30 by Barry Sears
A Balanced Diet: 40% Carbohydrates, 30% Protein, 30% Fat
Fat: Fat in food aids in the absorption of vitamins A, D, E, and K.
Very Best Sources for athletics: Fish, Olive Oil, Grapeseed Oil, Nuts, peanut butter, and butter. I am not keen on margarine at all.
Protein: Basic Building Blocks of muscle.
Very Best Sources for athletics: Beans and Legumes plus meats and fish!
Black beans, Pinto Beans, Red Beans, Lentils, Kidney Beans, and Black Eyed Peas are some examples.
Fish, Chicken, Turkey, and Venison are second
Eggs are third
Pork would be a fourth choice, as it’s a little higher in fat. Buffalo is a better forth choice
Red Meat is my 5th choice. Simply put, unless the cow lived its life in a pasture, I don’t think it packs the nutrients, especially omega 3. Loaded with saturated fats, and hard to digest. And Milk. Here is a strong study about avoiding today’s milk. Ovarian cancer, testicular, prostate, and breast cancer. And due to pasteurization, the enzymes used for digesting milk are flat-out gone. http://www.naturalnews.com/035081_pasteurized_milk_cancer_dairy.html
Many of us lack the gene which enables us to digest cow’s milk, anyway. And should we be drinking another animal’s milk?
Carbohydrates: Basic building blocks of energy.
Best sourced from grains, vegetables, and fruits. Very best sources:
Oatmeal, Barley, Brown and Wild Rice, Quinoa. Secondary Choices: White Rice, potatoes with skins.
Vegetables: There are no bad vegetables! Period! The very best is Spinach and Broccoli. . Carrots are an excellent source of energy.
Fruit: Tomatoes, Oranges, Grapes, Apples, Pears, Peaches, Tangerines, Avocadoes, Cherries, Raisins. Eat the fruit and not just drink the juice, as the juice has no fiber.
Cereals. Try to find those that have less gluten and sugars. Avoid those that are loaded with sugars.
Pickles are generally good for you, though I can’t stand them.
Great Snack Foods:
Nuts, Triscuits (they have only 3 ingredients in them), most soups, especially those with beans and lentils, peanut butter, raisins, apples, bananas, oranges, popcorn (not the microwave kind), celery, and carrots. If the food has few ingredients in it, and you like it, it’s probably a good snack food. Notice how everything I picked was a natural food or very minimally processed? Here is a trick that works great to making foods more palatable — dip them in olive oil with spices. Olive oil has lots of savory umami notes which most people love to eat.
When To Eat and Other Tips:
Eat Often, in smaller portions, and never eat until you are full!
When taking vitamins, take them during or right after a meal. You need to trick your body into thinking those vitamins came with the food and thus won’t be processed out of your body quickly. Two other great times for vitamins are after practice and before bed. Yes, before bed! As your body slows down during the sleep mode, vitamins will stay in your body longer and thus provide more opportunities for your body to use. Take Vitamin C, Vitamin D, and Zink to ward off sickness. Though I would rather you get them from food!!!
If you eat processed foods high in sugars or drink soft drinks, fruit juices, or “energy drinks”, consume something good with it to slow the processing of those sugars, especially the glucose in the blood system. Or get some quick exercise in to avoid those easy energy sources from becoming stored energy (fat) and making you hungry. Also, the over-consumption of sugars leads to inflammation (the source of many ailments), and insulin resistance by cells, For instance, if you have to have a soft drink, have nuts with it, or Triscuits, just something with fiber. Foods with fiber may hopefully slow down the absorption of sugars into your blood system. Really though, don’t consume very simple carbohydrates unless you plan on exercising—NOW! Not an hour later. Like, NOW!
You are really much, much better off avoiding sugary drinks anytime. I think pure sugar is worse than tobacco.
Sometimes on the way to the YMCA, I will eat something light for energy. I never eat/drink simple carbohydrates afterward, though as the sugars destroy any gains you made working out.
My children love banana bread. So do I. But I always add peanut butter for three reasons. First, peanut butter adds essential minerals, protein, and fat. Second, that protein and fat slow down the digestion process so the sugars from the banana bread do not absorb into the blood system as fast (at least I think so). Third, I eat less because the proteins and fat from the peanut butter create a more full sensation in me.
Do not eat meat or eggs or any other high-protein food soon before exercising. You will go slow because the energy that should go towards exercise performance is going to be used instead to digest those foods. Additionally, you might get sick.
DO NOT EAT PROCESSED FOODS ESPECIALLY WITH TRANS FATS BEFORE EXERCISE!!!!!!! NO FRIES EITHER!!!!! NO DOUGHNUTS EITHER!!!! NO FAST FOOD!!! THESE FOODS COULD VERY EASILY UPSET YOUR STOMACH AND WILL DRAIN ENERGY FROM YOU.
It’s always, always good to eat complex (not simple) carbohydrates and proteins after practice.
A good snack for energy before a Saturday morning race is some whole grain bread, some olive oil, spiced how you like it. I do find some energy bars to be fine too. I do have one better though. Keep reading. And honey!!! Enjoy honey!
If I have a can of Chicken Noodle Soup for lunch, I may add a little Olive Oil, to get it into the 40-30-30 diet. Olive Oil adds essential fat.
Avoid Trans Fats. However, don’t think that a box labeled “low in Trans Fats” is good for you. They probably replaced the fats with processed sugars which aren’t needed and can lead to Diabetes and Obesity
If you can’t understand the words on the food labels, those words indicate that the foods are processed.
V8 is a great, great beverage. THE BEST! Lots of vitamins and minerals, minimal extra calories, and V8 has a lot of fiber in it. I drink it before races (Hint!).
And the most controversial tip I have is this. Meets are long and hot and thus draining. A trick I used to get hydrated the night before a big triathlon or bike race was to add some extra salt to my food. Salt holds moisture, makes you thirsty, and thus allows you to hydrate more with it than without it. Additionally, salt provides good mineral content, and allows your body to process vitamins and minerals more efficiently. Salt gets a bad rap because most people consume way too much and it, like sugar, leads to inflammation. However, in athletics, it’s essential to have enough salt. A really, really good breakfast food before a meeting is a banana with salt or a banana with salty peanut butter. With a glass of V-8, you will be flying! This is my number 1 recommended 2-hour before a meet formula for lots of efficient energy. Forget about cramps! By the way, a banana with peanut butter and V-8 is perfectly balanced 40-30-30. And not all salts are the same. Try Iodized salt or sea salt which should contain iodine. Iodine is a great, great immune system booster.
What foods and beverages to avoid:
Highly processed foods.
If you can’t pronounce it or know what it is, it’s processed.
Avoid eating your “toes”, foods ending in “Toes” or “Tos”,
95% of all crackers on the market I think, are highly processed
75% of all cereals on the market I think are highly processed
100% of all cakes and pies on the market, I think, are highly processed
Sugary drinks, soft drinks, and ENERGY DRINKS, Only consume before an event. Their sugars easily convert into fat and they can make you hungry. And, they are strongly linked to Type 2 Diabetes
Diet drinks especially! Strongly linked to Type 2 Diabetes and they will make you crave simple carbohydrates.
Chips.
Margarine or any other processed fat.
Desserts
Salad dressings! A great way ruins a good diet is salad dressings.
Red Meat
Candy
Fast Food! Except for Subway!
Final Recommendations and Thoughts
If this diet becomes tough, try mixing in some things you like to make it bearable. If you have to have that Diet Soda, have it with some of the foods I recommend.
There is a lot of dietary fiber in this diet. It may take some time to get used to.
Tomato sauces are your friend. I consume them often.
This diet seems to be more expensive than most foods on the shelf. It is, but you’ll end up eating less and thus the cost difference will be minimal after a while.
Frozen and canned vegetables and beans are as good for you as fresh ones, so you can save money this way.
You will start feeling the benefits of this diet within a week. You will have more energy and you will feel better. You will have fewer tiring days in the pool.
The 40/30/30 diet was conceived in the early 1990s and was the basis for many of us racing at that time. I would suggest it is probably in use today by many athletic programs.
More fruits, more vegetables, and more grains will equal more energy. More processed foods will equal lethargy and upset stomachs before races.
This diet will help you keep your body toned up and looking good.
If you have a sugary drink, you must, must, must have it with other complex foods unless you are getting ready to exercise. Sugar before exercise and during exercise is fine.
Drink plenty of water. Water suppresses hunger, surprisingly.
You simply cannot get Type 2 Diabetes with this diet. It’s not possible.
You simply cannot develop Obesity with this diet. You really have to overeat. Simply put, it’s not comfortable to overeat on this diet.
Eat after you exercise. It is the basis for recovery. Nearly every morning, I fix myself something in the balance after leaving the YMCA.
Mix it up! BE WEIRD and PROUD OF IT!! This morning, before typing this, I mixed Turkey slices into my Oatmeal, which was cooked with a teaspoon of Olive Oil. YUCK, huh? Not really. Oats are fairly bland. So are mashed potatoes. So I ask you, why can’t you substitute oats for mashed potatoes especially if you add spices? And oats have more fiber than potatoes. Unconventional? Yes! Healthy? Oh yes!!!
And lastly, in 1958, the average grocery store was no bigger than the pool area at the YMCA. Simply put, there were hardly any processed foods.
In summary, I mentioned several things over and over. I’m not a perfect eater, but I am careful. Yes, I treat myself to some cake, pies, etc on occasion. You need to enjoy life, right? If you give this diet a try, you will be amazed at how much better you may feel, and how much energy you have. Then after going on it for a while, indulge in some fast food and soft drinks and see how you feel. The drop-off from those processed and fast foods is quick and dramatic.
What you interpret as flavor includes all 5 senses, plus current mood, plus past experiences. Huh?
Hardest first: Sound: From: http://www.pri.org/stories/2012-02-15/synesthesia-can-you-taste-difference-between-sounds, Daphne Maurer a developmental psychologist at McMaster University in Canada tells us this about Synesthesia, which causes a person’s senses to overlap in unusual ways. Ms. Maurer says a new study of music and taste suggests that we all have a touch of it though “it rarely influences our conscious perception.” So what is “synesthesia”?
Oxford University psychologist Charles Spence studies human senses and how they interact. In recent studies, he had people smell wines and sample chocolate, and then match the different aromas and flavors to different musical sounds. He found that people tend to associate sweet tastes with high-pitched notes and the sounds of a piano. People match bitter flavors with low notes and brass instruments.
Spence wondered if he could put this finding to use. Could he use music to influence what people smell or taste?
To find out, he conducted another study. He had volunteers eat several pieces of toffee while listening to music. One soundscape was composed of “sweet” sounds, the other of “bitter” sounds.
Spence then asked the volunteers to rate the sweetness or bitterness of each piece of toffee. All of the toffee was the same, but the volunteers perceived the pieces differently.
“We were significantly able to change the rating of the bitterness and sweetness of the food depending on the sound they were listening to,” says Spence.
Vision: Easy enough. Color perception in a wine evokes positive and negative affirmations about how the flavor will be perceived. A dry red dry drinker may get extremely excited if he/she sees a deep, dark wine. Or perhaps seeing a bottle of Opus One, at a price of $229, which we will be trying tonight. Hearing that a bottle costs $229 already changes the perception of flavor, doesn’t it? Back to the sound we go….
Touch: Simple enough. In wine, we talk a lot about mouth feel. For instance, in judging wine compare water, with a simple, thin mouth feel to milk and crème which has a thicker, richer mouthfeel, for many. From the Huffington Post, I found this interesting snippet on taste and feel: “ Flavor & Mouthfeel
“Flavor, in the technical sense, is defined as the combined sensations of taste (from taste buds) odor, and mouthfeel. Mouthfeel means the way food feels in your mouth. It encompasses texture, moisture level, fluidity, temperature, chewiness, greasiness, astringency, pain (like that from hot chili peppers), and any other tactile experience we get while chewing or swallowing. It may seem strange at first to consider the smell and texture of food to be a part of its flavor, but your brain is already taking into account these things when it’s processing whether you find a food pleasant or not. Take beef jerky for example. If you dug into a bag of beef jerky only to find out that it was dried out and tough, you’d call it “bad” beef jerky. Even if it has the exact same taste and odor molecules as a “good” bag, the terrible mouthfeel ruins it! And that’s true for a lot of foods, like soggy cereal, warm soda, or stale chips.”
Taste: Taste, right now, is supposedly limited to sweet, salt, bitter, acid, and umami. Taste is a sensation that sends pulses to the brain when receptors are engaged with food or beverages.
Smell: Safety first! Before drinking anything, you will breathe through the nose to see if it is safe to consume and if you have had a past prior experience with it. A positive past experience allows you to consume the beverage. A negative experience, and perhaps you will pass on whatever is in the glass. It is through the olfactory experience in which a lot of flavors are identified: through aroma! The olfactory nerves pick up literally thousands of aromas, and it’s the odor aromas that allow you to taste and identify flavors from toasty and nutty to fruity and grassy.
The reason the shape of the glass affects flavor recognition is simple. Different shaped glasses allow for various aromas to escape both into the nose passageways (nasal odors) and from the back of the mouth (retronasal).
Tie that into past experiences also playing a factor in taste preferences adds yet another wrinkle. Per Tim Hanni, “It’s difficult to rewire our sensory hardware unless there is some sort of physical injury, metabolism shift, or pharmaceutical interaction, but we can be constantly rewriting our software to incorporate our aspirations and experiences.” Additionally, “Why you like what you like is determined by a coalescence of immediate sensations, preprogrammed intuitive responses to sensory stimuli and memories from our life experiences all coming together for processing in our brain.” Translation: If you got sick of a food or beverage chances are you probably won’t want to consume it. If an aroma or flavor even evokes a negative memory, such as being forced to cut the grass when little, forced to eat foods when little that you didn’t like, chances are you may not like it as an adult. Or just the opposite can occur too. Festive foods at festive times can create positive attractions to foods and beverages with those aromas.
Migration from Sweet Wine to Dry Wine and Why Some Never Switch!
If you want a great read on a neat subject about taste, check out Tim Hanni’s website, www.timhanni.com. Tim is the second person in the United States to achieve the title of “Master of Wine”. Tim’s book, “Why You Like The Wines You Like delves into that individual’s variance in taste bud count can play a significant, significant role in what we like and dislike and that high taste bud count folks are much more super sensitive to taste bud stimulation, and makes the case that foods and beverages with high bitters need to be offset by sweetness in order to make the beverage more pleasant. His research basically blows up all food and wine pairings that we commonly see today. For instance, dry red wine and steak are supposed to be the perfect pairing, but folks with a whole lot more taste buds than others receive a not-so-tasty metallic finish when pairing the two together. Cool, huh? Perhaps restaurants should think of offering sweet Moscato to customers who want something other than a dry red with their steak. Hey, bottom line revenue got walloped when the sweet person switched to tea instead of the nice, sweeter wine they would have preferred with their meal.
But I digress.
So how do folks migrate from sweeter wines to drier wines? Part of it can be to aspire to dry wines because “that’s what real wine drinkers drink.” Too often though, I hear people say, “I used to like sweeter wines, but now, that sweetness is too cloying, too sugary.” Humans, in general, have weak digestive systems, much weaker than any other animal that I can think of. Can a dog drink out of a puddle without getting sick? Can you? I can’t.
Some amazing research has revealed that if a fruit contains fructose, it is 100% safe to consume. We can’t seemingly identify any poisonous berries containing fructose. Putting it simply, I truly believe that we are hardwired to like sweetness, not only because our body can convert it into an energy source quickly but because of its inherent safety. As I like to say, “If it is sweet, it is safe to eat.”
I very rarely run into the dry red drinker who says they have always liked dry red wines from the start. Most people seemingly start off their wine-drinking voyage by drinking the white zin’s, Rieslings, Moscato’s, etc. Aside from wanting to “graduate” to dry reds, I think the phenomenon to migrate to dry red wines over time is tied to food safety and vitamin and mineral recognition. When starting off drinking wine, sweetness is the crutch to liking wine, to liking something new that’s different. Then, once the body identifies that wine has some good stuff in it, then the reliance and dependence upon sweetness start to diminish. Think of sweetness in wine as a crutch. Once the body gets comfortable with wine, the need for sweetness in order to consume wine diminishes. Wine becomes an item that is identified as good, regardless of whether it is sweet or not. At least that’s my theory and I am sticking by it.
Flavor Balancing:
To modify flavors in wine, use salt and acidity (lemons) to decrease tannins and bitterness and sweetness and umami (savory) to increase tannins and bitterness. Thanks, Tim Hanni, for this tip!!!
Is taste subjective? You like red, your husband likes white. You like sweet, he likes dry.
Why?
From my good friend Tim Hanni, at www.timhanni.com you can gain a new understanding of the way you discover, share, and think about wine.
Humans range in taste-bud count from as few as 500 to more than 12,000. Someone with 500 tastes things differently than someone with 12,000.
People having a 500-taste bud count crave intensity and big, bold flavors. They love a 100 Point Cabernet with massive oak and tannins.
Those sporting a 12,000-taste bud count tend to like sweetness, and salt and are very sensitive about alcohol content too.
ASSOCIATING FLAVORS – GOOD, BAD, OR INDIFFERENT
Flavor association and past experiences are tied to survival. They also signal safety for us. Try finding a poisonous fruit that contains fructose. Did you know that no harmful bacteria can live in honey? Have you ever become ill from food or beverage? Do you still consume it? Not likely. Therefore, we are predisposed to like sweets. Sweetness is used as a crutch for liking new foods and beverages.
We also find safety in flavors we are familiar with. Can you remember a cookie or some other great-tasting food from your childhood? Of course, you can! As humans, we’re the only animal species that can’t drink out of a puddle without getting sick. Think about that!
From a consumption standpoint, we are constantly building a flavor and aroma library of likes and dislikes, so we never forget an aroma or a flavor.
Dry red wines have no other food or beverage flavor associations, so it is extremely rare to find someone who, when they first started to drink wine, started with a dry red wine. Thus, nearly everyone starts off liking sweeter wines, and as the body adjusts to the wonderful positive chemistry of wine, and its 1500 natural chemical compounds, the reliance, and dependence on sweetness begin to wane, thus introducing people to the flavorful world of dry red wines.
Food is the mechanism that gets people to move to dry wine.
If you want to start liking dry reds, drink more wine pairing it with familiar food, such as lasagna or a burger. Soon, your brain will start a positive association to dry red wine because it was paired with something you like and are accustomed to consuming.
You can also try a variety of wines. This enables you to experience new flavors and discover how tasty wines can be when blended. Some find the taste of dry red wine and a big steak to be delicious. For others, like me, I get a metallic finish (email me at turtlerunwinery@gmail.com if you want to know more about this phenomenon).
SHAPE MATTERS
Feeling adventurous? Try the same wine out of different shaped glasses. Stemware is an important aspect of wine and can greatly influence the aromas and flavors in the wine. Don’t “buy into” the concept that a “red wine glass” should only be used for red wines. Try whites in them too! The same holds for “white wine glasses”, by trying reds in them as well.
Different sizes and shaped wine glasses change the volumetric pressure and vapor pressure of the wine. Naturally, without thinking, you will shape your lips differently to adjust to the shape of the glass. Additionally, you will naturally position and shape your tongue according to the shape of the glass. These are the basic differences unique shapes of glasses provide you as a taster.
From a sensory standpoint, most of the flavor you experience will come from aromatics, so the glass shape will affect the aromas you experience before you taste the wine as you breathe in through the nose before sipping, and the aromas you experience once the wine starts to vaporize on your tongue (most of what you supposedly taste is aromatics vaporizing and sensitizing the backside of your olfactory nerve).
VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE
There are over 10,000 different grape varieties grown in the world for making wine. Additionally, some varieties have clones of themselves.
For instance, our Cabernet Franc that we grow is clone 347. Wow, so many choices….
If you made wine from 100% of the grapes, here is where the wine would get the flavors (approximate percentages):
Grape Seeds 65%
Grape Stems 19%
Grape Skins 15%
Grape Juice 1%
With white wine, all we care about is the juice, the 1%. With reds, we carefully manage the 1% while adding the effects of the grape skins (the 15%).
Ever notice when you try wines made from grapes that you’ll pick up flavors of strawberry, cherry, apple, blackberry, and so forth?
Did we add those flavors to the wines? Not a chance!
NOTE: There are more than 1500 natural chemical compounds that exist in a bottle of wine. Many natural chemical compounds are shared between plants. And some with animals. Therefore, that apple taste you find in our Vignoles may be a shared chemical between a certain apple variety and our Vignoles.
WINE MIND GAMES
Adding to the allure of wine is how your mind processes such a delicious beverage. Before you consume any beverage, your sense of smell kicks into gear and tells you some wonderfully basic things.
Is the beverage safe to drink or not? Seriously, safe beverages haven’t been around for more than maybe 100 years. And that includes water!
After your sense of smell gives you the green light, it next tries to associate the aroma with a pleasurable experience. Or a bad one. Tossed this in the porcelain bus before. Not again!
Your tongue is NOT divided up between bitter, sweet, salt, acid, and umami receptors. But due to olfactory sensitivities, it does matter what areas of the tongue sense flavors and aromas first.
So here we go, a body in constant survival mode, sensing for safety and past experiences constantly, taking in a beverage with over 1500 natural chemical compounds, many of them shared with other plants.
YOU BE THE JUDGE AND JURY
Hindsight is 20/20. Knowing what you know now wouldn’t you agree that:
Does trying wine in different shaped glasses affect the flavor and aroma of wine? Yes! Every uniquely styled wine glass will provide subtle and not-so-subtle changes in the wine complexity. You are on your own for figuring out the style of glass you like for the wines you like most.
The art of a great wine may not exist in a single variety, such as Cabernet Sauvignon, but rather in how the winery blends different wines to create more complexity.
With over 1500 natural chemical compounds, everything counts – the grape variety, where it’s grown, the weather for that year, the yearly vineyard maintenance, and the harvest parameters.For you folks who know wine, that’s called terroir, and I live for it! Terroir is soil type, climate, microclimate, Mesoclimate, elevation, slope, human influences in pruning and vineyard maintenance, etc., etc.…etc. Throw in the harvest date too, And that week’s weather!
The temperature of the wine can also affect flavor and enjoyment. Typically, the warmer it is, the more fruit and perhaps the more alcohol is noticed in the wine. And oak too! Some reds we prefer cool and some whites we prefer at room temperature, and vice versa.The cooler the wine is, the more prevalent the acids in it will be. It’s also less oaky, less fruity, and will have more tannic if it’s a red, but less alcohol too.
THE BEST FOOD AND WINE RECOMMENDATION
Take the food you like most and pair it with the wines you like most! Simple! So simple! If that doesn’t work, try adding salt and lemon to the food to balance the flavors.
Hi! Glad you made it. Everyone down here was wondering how long it would take for you to find this page.
Corks are popping here as we are preparing for the launch of our brand-new Wine Club. Brand-new in that it is not only innovative but interactive so everyone can join in the fun.
Now, hold on there pilgrim…This is not going to be your traditional wine club where you commit to buying a bottle or two every month. We feel that’s archaic! We want you to have fun in our wine club, so we are going down the rabbit hole with this one.
I can’t release any details just yet but be prepared for the ride of your life as we all go down the rabbit hole together.
Ready for your next Wine adventure?
Keep checking back regularly on this page for further details.
Turtle Run Winery prides itself on producing top-quality, health-conscious wines with a flair for being consistently exceptional but not necessarily exceptionally consistent.
Allow Jim to explain – Two phrases should pop into that sentence, “Health Conscious” and “Not Necessarily Exceptionally Consistent.”
First on health. Sugar is killing us in so many ways, yet many people prefer sweeter wines due primarily to the number of taste buds on their tongues. American wineries typically take dry wine (wine that has finished fermentation completely) and back-add sugar, juice, or juice concentrate before bottling, thus making a dry wine sweet.
By doing so, the wine’s residual sugar becomes half glucose and half fructose (since sucrose breaks down in acidic solutions into its two component parts, glucose, and fructose). But it’s the glucose that’s problematic for the body (think type 2 diabetes, inflammation, a cancer food source).
The world’s most recognized sweet wines do not have added sugar to sweeten them before bottling. Nor do ours. The world’s most recognized dry red wines are made from the fruit and not from added outside chemicals such as powdered tannins. Our dry red wines ferment and age on the skins from a minimum of three weeks up to two months. On occasion, Jim will use an old French technique of re-using skins to deepen the complexity of his dry reds. And yes, the wines are barrel aged. No powdered oak or chips are ever poured into stainless steel tanks to pick up oak flavors.
At most European wineries and Turtle Run too, sweet wine is obtained via arrested fermentation, a process in which fermentation is carefully monitored and the wines are filtered right when the residual sugar is where the winemaker wants the taste to be.
From 2009-2012, Jim conducted break-through research in which he discovered yeast sequential fermentation: whereby yeast converts sugars into heat, alcohol, and carbon dioxide in a unique order.
If sugar is added, it splits the sugar molecule into one part glucose and one part fructose. Think of glucose as a nice T-bone steak and fructose as overcooked broccoli. I’ll eat the broccoli, but I prefer the steak, so I’ll eat the steak first (glucose) and then the broccoli (fructose) last. As it turns out, fructose has 3 calories per gram, glucose 4, so with arrested fermentation, there’s a 25% savings in calories because, at the end of the day, all that’s left is fructose.
Second, fructose is 2.2 times sweeter than glucose and 1.72 times sweeter than sugar. Translation – Turtle Run’s sweetest wine has about 3.5% residual sugar. For a winery to equal our same sweetness, nearly 7% sugar needs to be added. This is a total win for the consumer since fructose is not nearly as disruptive to the body as glucose, Speaking of grams. Turtle Run wines contain about 12-14 grams of fructose per bottle.
Jim simply does not like using additives in his dry wines. Modern winemaking today uses plenty of additives that are perfectly legal.
From liquid oak to powdered tannins, to all sorts of fining agents.
So many folks these days no longer drink dry reds because they claim it causes headaches. Turtle Run wines are based on grapes and aging in barrels with no oak or tannin additives. From this, you get pure wine that keeps headaches at bay. Yes, sulfites are added, but only because it is required by law. FYI – sulfites are not the culprit of headaches.
Wines contain upwards of 1500 natural chemical compounds, many of which are leached into the wine from the skins. Long skin contact wines allow everything good to be pulled out of the skin. For dry reds, Turtle Run arguably has the longest skin contact in America, at and after fermentation.
Jim could go the additive way to drive for consistency but that wouldn’t be much fun. He wants the best each vintage can deliver, so that means vintage variation. Fortunate or not, due to yearly weather variations vines are going to produce different fruit every year.
Not changing anything from what is written above, but I (Jim) wrote the following on 8/4/2023 about the red wine headache. Be ready.
8/4/2023:
The red wine headache explained. Ever get a headache from just a little bit of red wine? Or a stuffy nose? Or a flushed face? Any other allergic reaction? By the way, what I type here cannot be found on the internet except at our Turtle Run Winery website. Here comes my strong hypothesis. Be ready. I am on my own island on this.
Most people believe that yeast only ferment sugars into heat, co2 and ethyl alcohol. If I were to make black bean wine, yeast would remove the inflammatory protein known as lectin. Now, there are no lectins in wine but I add this paragraph as another useful activity that yeast do when fermenting.
Yeast also remove histamines. And this is where I am heading. Grapes have a small amount of histamines in their skins and we ferment red wines on their skins. But in fermentation yeast will remove the histamines, so how can it be histamines?
Think of the allergic reactions that people have with red wine and all of them align with allergic reactions to histamines.
I rarely, rarely run into anyone who says they have an allergic reaction to our red wines, and I have had hundreds who have sworn off drinking red wines try our red wines and they have no problem. So if it’s indeed histamines and the yeast remove histamines, how are they getting back into the wine?
Think of it this way. If you swore off sugar and I handed you a small packet of sugar and said “eat this sugar,” you would probably do it and realize no negative health outcomes. Now, if I gave you a 64 oz liter of a sugary drink and said, “here, drink this,” you might feel a little woozy afterwards, right?
So if I gave you a bunch of grapes and you ate them, you probably wouldn’t have an allergic reaction because the concentration of histamines in the skins is pretty low.
Our wine industry is allowed to add more than 80 different ingredients into wine and one thing our industry likes is a consistent product. Wines naturally contain upwards of 1500 chemical compounds, so in order for wine to taste and look exactly the same year after year there are fining agents, coloring agents, liquid oak and powdered tannins added to wine to give it the look, feel and taste, the same consistency year after year.
Yeast remove histamines. There are super concentrated coloring agents and powdered tannins available to me to add to wine to fix color and tannins. Let’s think of that 64 oz liter at this point.
Super concentration of color and tannins added to wine to me, is like drinking a 64 oz liter of soda. These product are added after fermentation to fix color, mouthfeel, flavor and texture…when the yeast are no longer there to do their magic. My strong hypothesis is this. When natural grape skin derivatives are super concentrated, like anthocyanin, the color component, naturally the histamines will be concentrated. Added back into the wine after fermentation releases a super concentration of histamines, way more than what the grapes could have possibly delivered in grape juice. With yeast not around to clean up this excess amount of histamines, the human body is exposed to a 64 oz serving, so to speak of histamines.
I seriously don’t think anyone is allergic to red wine. I think there are plenty of people allergic to wine that has been modified though. If you stop by Turtle Run Winery, check out the color of our red wines. Yep, they are lighter in color than a great many that you can buy in the stores. And that is fine with me.
Many of Turtle Runs dry whites are barrel fermented though not oaky. Lactones that are imparted by the barrels are minimalized in such a way as to highlight the fruitfulness of the wines. The barrels used and the temperatures they achieve for making whites because of a process called autolysis positively affect the smoothness and body of their wines.
Some say Jim’s “Chard” is a dead ringer for topflight white burgundies. And Turtle Runs “Serendipity”, a blended white, screams of the aromas and flavors of wines from southern France.
Your crazy winemaker is at it again. The date 12/6/2019 lives in perpetuity here. That was when we yet again bucked tradition and we rolled two oak barrels out the back door to age outside on the crush pad until 4/23/2020. Two barrels inside, two outside. Tradition? Age the wine in caves! Constant temperature, constant humidity — better wine. So “they” say. But that’s not valid science! Unless one tests against hypothesis, yeah, whatever. We rolled two barrels outside and kept 2 inside. One inside and one outside tells us something, but two out and two in tells us a whole lot more. And indeed we discovered that the two outside aged wines were much more smooth and in a blind study of seven tasters, all 7 preferred the two outside barrels over the two inside barrels. Bingo!
Fast forward to today, 8/8/2023. Well, we have to go backwards to 6/20/2023. That’s the date that I did the UNTHINKABLE. Yep, 4 new barrels are in the barn and are filled with Montepulciano 2022. Up and down we go with temperature. I learned that the barrels outside really didn’t like direct rain and sun, and I would not want direct sun in the summer on any wine. Wine over 90 degrees tends to madierize, or carmelize, yikes. But even if the ambient temperature crests above 90, the wine will never make it to that temperature because the average daily temperature is never 90. I can tell you that, at this date, it’s a whoosh! Another outlandish decision gone great!
New wines: Our blend-a-holic ways are front and center, with Grenache added to the dry red list which has 12% of our Sledgehammer Red in it. The “Sledge” as we call it, is a great blend of Merlot, Frontenac and Grenache.
Tommy’s blend, a customer, is finally on the list on the sweet side. A careful blend of Vignoles and Diamond gives us “Clear My Mind,” which is a super complex, fruity sweet wine that in one week is taking over our sweet wine list, pushing aside such venerable stablemates as Blue My Mind, Red My Mind, Lost My Mind and Catawba.
Crimson Cuvee is back on the dry red list and with an assemblage of wines across many vintages, its refined flavors and long finish are particularly pleasing to the palate.
Catherine’s Blend is back…thank goodness, and this semi-sweet white is a crazy good blend of riesling, chardonnay and vignoles. Superb!
Joe’s Jammin’ Red is also back and has in its blend for the first time our Frontenac Rose. So, so, so dang tasty.
Cheers, Jim
Updates from April 2023:
We are in another great year of creating blends. The newest three wines are all very unique blends. We’ll start with Old Capitol Red, a blend of chambourcin, cabernet sauvignon and black muscat. We gained access to black muscat at the very last second last fall when our west coast grower called in a panic because his buyer literally backed out of the grapes after they had been picked. We purchased another stainless steel tank and the grapes came to us. After tasting the grapes, I knew the best wine would be to ferment the grapes on the skins for 2 days, press, then cold ferment and filter, leaving behind natural residual sugar. Un or fortunately, our cold tanks were spoken for and thus we had to go the dry red route with these grapes. And as a dry red on its own, no one is going to like it. The wine is not fruity. Spicy, yes. Fruity, not a chance. But it does have body, mouthfeel and spice and blended in with the fruity chambourcin and cabernet sauvignon, we have made a very stellar blend.
Old Capitol White is a blend of Aromella and Chardonel. The fruity forwardness and overall smoothness of this white wine makes for an easy to approach white that is good for all occasions.
Escape My Mind is the same blend as before, steuben and diamond, but this year’s version is slightly sweeter, courtesy of the 2022 diamond.
Updates from April 2021
Zinfandel 2020, a dry red, has been bottled and released. Originally fermented in stainless steel, then pressed 6 weeks post-fermentation, we finished fermentation in oak barrels. Incredible fruit of blackberry and raspberry notes, lovely tannins, and very intense flavors. A classic!
Winter Solstice NV: An absolute solid blend of 73% Traminette 2020 and 27% Diamond 2019. Tastes dry but there is a slight bit of residual sugar left behind. Spicy and fruity and very loosely filtered to capture a big, bold white wine with lots of character.
Updates from April 2021:
Where to start. Oh yeah, that glass. A wine that is not on the wine list. You know what it is — RIESLING! Yes, we bottled Riesling. Riesling! I intro’d Riesling to a bunch of people late last spring and early summer when we couldn’t conduct tastings. So why not put ALL THE WINES, out there? It’s made a little sweeter than my preference, but good golly is it tasty! Whew!!!!
What’s fun is bouncing between it and the wine with Riesling that is on the list, “Ease My Mind!” “Ease” is 65% Riesling and 35% Geisenheim, a Riesling hybrid off of Chancellor. “Ease” is a treasure! The Geizenheim added some additional acidity and perhaps some citrus notes to the crazy tropical notes of Riesling. As I am typing this, I am sipping back and forth. Okay, which has the longer “last?” A great 30 seconds on Riesling and still goes. Hard to beat. Now for “Ease”. Hmmm…Interesting. A tie, I think. Might have to try this again. Weee!!! This is so fun! No sugar buzz due to no sugar, so no headache.
Next wine: The new “Trio of Taste Satisfaction” on the dry white side (so far, I have revealed 5 glasses on my desk, and a cup of tea!) Rhapsody in White, Chardonnay, and Aromella. Hmmm…With which should I tempt my taste buds first? Still tasting the Riesling. I had to get another sip. Any illegal drugs in this? Ahem. Sorry. Let’s go with Rhapsody in White! Okay, here goes. Slurp. Ha Ha! I didn’t slurp! This is a Chardonnay, Chardonel, and Vignoles blend and I can easily taste all three. After going from Riesling, I can really taste the dryness and the subtle oak, mostly from the Chardonel which aged 18 months in oak. Goodness. Maybe I should try some of that “artificial insemination of oak into wine — liquid oak” in a wine. There’s no way! Uh-oh, I’m coming off the rails with the wine I can see. Anyway, this oak is so subtle, so much like a perfect spouse, like Laura! The oak in this wine, because it’s natural is just so seemingly integrated into the flavors of the wine. Subtle. But the fruit. Wow! Finish. All there. Okay, what’s next. Oh, let’s go with Chardonnay. I’m going to cut grass later today. Ha, that should be funny. The chardonnay is just flat-out classic chardonnay, and I went against my normality and really reduced my blending partners with it. Usually, 8% or so Traminette to extend the finish but this wine only has 2% Aromella added to do the “dirty work” of making the Chardonnay finish exquisitely. Okay, not quite the last of Rhapsody which falls a few seconds short of Riesling, but I like the “package”, the entire package that this Chardonnay is presenting to my senses. Amazing. Oh, I can’t wait for the last one. Here goes. Ahhhh. Aromella! Gosh, the lime and lemon notes are staggering my taste buds and nose hairs. What a ride! Aged outside. The fruit. The acids. Spot on. Finish too! Goodness. What a soothing white wine. We-be-in-trouble the day this sells out. There are five tastings. Wait, there’s another wine glass on my desk!!! How about that? We’ll what should I do? Try it!!! Do tell, what is this lovely red? A shocker. Nothing like this one. Cabernet Sauvignon. A fruit bomb of a red, just bottled — went through the Rhapsody in White filters. This is crazy fruit! Like really smooth and crazy fruit. Soft cherry-berry notes just fly around everywhere. Ahhh….. Very drinkable.
And yet, I find one more wine glass. I have no idea how I am still typing or what this email is going to look like. I may have to edit it tomorrow morning. Cabernet Franc!!! Whoa! Just blew a gasket in my taste buds! The tannins. Goodness, this is a tight wine. I knew it was but still. Made saignee by bleeding juice during fermentation to give us a higher skin-to-juice ratio. Added some cab sauv in at bottling plus some 2008 Chambourcin to soften and liven up the fruit. This is a “two taste bud” wine…fer sure!!!! Yes, that’s a purposeful typo.
Last two. Yes, two more glasses. Sweet time again!!! Wine not, right? We’re screwed! Catawba! It’s Red. Yes, Red. No, not some shade of pink-red, but red. The flavors were beyond ripe. Never tasted anything like it. 2019 was super clear and a little under-ripe, but this one is super ripe! You can still taste some classic catawba flavors, but there is something different about this one. Wow! What flavors!!! What a finish. Where is that Riesling? Dang it, empty! Well, I have some Ease! Okay, finish time, who finishes longer? Hmmm….interesting. Ease is longer, but Catawba really explodes in the mouth. Wow!
Lost My Mind has that 2020 Catawba in it. Trying….ridiculous! That’s just ridiculously good! Superb!!! What a fruit bomb!!! Dang!
Updates from December 2020:
We had to make an “upgrade” on our sweet wine side. It seemed like we were selling out of a few gems and there were several former mainstays that needed to come back, such as…CATHERINE’S BLEND! Whoop.
I told Cath that we may have blended one of the single best blends ever. Before setting the stage to blend the wine, I looked at every single blend we had ever done. So many incredible blends have been put together to create that zip, that zing, that full flavor that it has been known for during these many years. The two most notable varieties in the blend are Vignoles and Chardonnay. The best blends are from our vineyard’s Vignoles and my friend in Lodi’s chardonnay. I have three partner growers and all grow dazzling chardonnay grapes. For this wine, we knew we would use Geisenheim, a relative of riesling, and a recent grape in the Catherine production. For fermentation, we cut the fermentation at the same level as a “My Mind” sweet wine, which gave us a lot of options for complexity to dry it out with the other varieties. We pulled samples of chardonnay, chardonel, and Vignoles from my New York partner (we had no Vignoles from our vineyard in 2019 due to a herbicide drift) and our 2020 harvest of Vignoles. The blend came together splendidly and quickly. The chardonnay added to the Geisenheim added a great smoothness, but it was the Vignoles from our 2020 harvest with its pop of acid and crispness that closed the deal. I don’t think I have run into anyone yet who hasn’t liked this wine. Seriously. It’s been a slam dunk! Luckily, we blended a ton of it so availability should last quite some time. But still. This one’s designed to taste great now and age and age.
Serendipity is back! What is “Serendipity?” Well, we haven’t blended it since 2017, due mostly to herbicide drift in our vineyard. It’s a blend of Vignoles and traminette and is the original Catherine’s Blend from 2004. We took our 2020 Vignoles and blended it with 2020 traminette from our partner grower in PA (traminette got hit hard with our May 8th freeze this year). It’s sweet, but not “that” sweet, and what I have found is, for me, there is no better foodie wine than this one. It’s got some snappy spice from the traminette that really pops with the acidity of the Vignoles. The finish is very long and enduring. Just a gem of a wine. It also, over the years, is one of those wines that I’ll take off the list very prematurely to hold inventory for folks who want Serendipity during our concerts.
Traminette (Sweet): I miss our estate grown traminette this year. This variety, like many, demonstrates site-specific or what we call terroir, flavors. Our vineyard partner is right on the shores of Lake Erie and the soils are very well drained. Our vineyard serves up nice mineral content whereas our partners provide more body and mouthfeel. Both provide about the same amount and quality of flavonoid compounds, thank goodness, so there is a built-in consistency within the traminette. We stopped fermentation not quite in the “My Mind” level of residual sugar (3.5%) but not where I typically go for my personal sweet spot (1.5%) because I knew I would use it for making Serendipity. It’s not quite “Sweet Tortuga” (remember that sweet traminette that I really need to make again!) but sweeter than our last sweet traminette. Good, no great lingering flavors.
Geisenheim (the Riesling hybrid) is back! And, of course, sweeter than the last time, this time parked right at the “My Mind” sweetness or just a shade off (3.2%) because I knew I would use it for blending to make Catherine’s Blend. It was popular at 1.5% residual sugar, it’s now stealing “My Mind” customers at 3.2%. Great acid, lovely tropical fruit flavors, I’m so glad my partner grower in New York grows this oddball of a grape. It’s on my list to plant!!!! If I can only find cuttings/starts….sigh! Why is it an “oddball?” It’s so obscure that it doesn’t even appear as a grape variety on the federal registry of grapes, that’s why!
Red My Mind: Okay, dilemma. Are we out? NO!! But the Red My Mind customers have had a treat the past two years. My PA grower has had two straight optimal summers to grow concord and this wine elevated in the past two years to become “thing 2” in sales right behind “thing 1” a.k.a. “Blue My Mind.” Due to logistics, to get the Geisenheim into fermentation, we needed to shelve our PA grapes into freezing and we had to rely on our NY partner at harvest time. There was a certain intensity and mouthfeel (going back to that) from my PA grower. In trouble down here in southern IN! Until….blending. Red my Mind for the longest time has been pure concord. What to do? Easy. Added Geisenheim. Just enough and voila, the bright, vivid flavors, which are inescapable, by the way, of concord but adding in just the right amount of Geisenheim gave it the smoothness we were looking for. Right now, we are thawing the PA grapes and I have full intentions of blending the two concords together in two months.
One and Done (the “P” wine): Ever get “the look” from your spouse? Know what that’s like? That’s this wine. A simply bad calculation on my part, or perhaps the lack of slowing down just enough during the rush of October. Is “One and Done” bad? Oh no. Not at all. It’s an incredible blend of cabernet franc 2015, Frontenac 2019, and diamond 2019, making this wine-made logistics in the winery simply roll. When putting into the computer spreadsheets all my winemaking notes right before Thanksgiving (the spreadsheets hadn’t been updated since August — literally no time), I realized, A, that’s a lot of winemaking, and B, that’s a lot of logistics. Had we not blended and bottled this wine, logistics on other wines may have come to a screeching halt! Literally! I was super proud of this “Joe’s Jammin’ Red” blend that I blended and bottled. Thought it was great. Perfect for Joe’s. Then Laura tried it. “No, you cannot call this Joe’s Jammin’ Red. It doesn’t taste like Joe’s and there is way too much alcohol.” Wait, what? “Too much alcohol!!! Can’t you taste that heat?” Dang it….sigh. Yep, sure can. “Okay, it does taste great, Jim…..But it’s not Joe’s Jammin’ Red!” Yikes! So why is it called “the P wine and how did I screw this up? During the concerts, we ran out of Joe’s and some folks wanted that off-dry red. Well, there’s my mistake over there. Not labeled. Not worried about it. We make custom labels from time to time and I had some leftover Our Lady of Providence High School 50-year anniversary labels. So taking care of a customer during the Sunday music, I grabbed a bottle and slapped a blue and white label with a big ol’ “P” on it. Before I could blink an eye, a customer at the concert sees that someone is drinking a non-Turtle Run wine and reported the culprits to me. Nope, it’s this little mistake, a high heat Joe’s, so to speak. “Can I have one?” Now, there are two areas drinking “illegal” wine. You see where this is going. More bottles, more eyes, more reports, and more “P” wine!!!! So how did I screw it up? Easy! The computer. I looked at our last Joe’s blend and I had all of the components, but instead of cracking open a bottle I just made the best wine I could. The problem is evaporation. And topping off barrels. When it is humid, the alcohol evaporates through the barrel’s oak staves. When dry, water evaporates. When we try and test our barrels, we top off with more wine. In the course of a year, the alcohol percentage typically climbs per barrel a percent and a half. So only paying attention to flavor, I blended with nearly the same quantities as before, but One and Done are a percent and a quarter more than Joe’s in alcohol. You can taste it. And it tastes great!!! But it’s not Joe’s. It is the same blend as Joe’s as before, franc, Frontenac, and diamond. So what do I call this one-time wine that I’ll never make again? One and Done!!
Updates from November 2020: It can be hard to keep up with the website. From August to the first or second week of November it is an absolute rush to keep up with the winemaking. From harvest to controlling fermentation, pressing dry reds, to barrel work to bottling. It’s constant movement. It’s great!
So I’ll highlight a few wines that have rolled out this fall.
Vignoles 2020: I’ve got such a wild thought on this wine. More on that. It’s fun when we can get some 2020 wines on the list while in 2020 and it happens every year that we have an early release or two. If the wine is ready, why not? But there is another persistent reason for getting 2020s on the wine list. Harvest and tank and barrel space. If we don’t do it, we run out of space due to incoming grapes. At this time of the year, I sometimes think back and think, how did we manage this year’s harvest? It’s fun indeed. I absolutely love racy bright whites and this one fits the bill. Clean, refreshing fruit, a long and lingering aftertaste. Its crispness is a delight. And the wine is super clear! More on that.
Robin’s Revenge 2020: This year, we faced three freezes which changed the outcome of the wines we can make from our vineyard. The freezes were April 14, 15, and May 8. It seems in the past 7 years that April and May are trending colder, while the fall months, September, October, and November are trending warmer. With many varieties of grapes, we grow sitting on way-below-normal harvests, field blending of different grapes and different juices are front and center. This one was the trickiest of all because the blend I knew would be Steuben, traminette, diamond, and catawba, and the harvest would occur over the course of a month, so we had to keep fermentation from starting. And the harvest of diamonds would be problematic as bumblebees would be among the grapes when we harvest. You’re probably thinking stings, right? That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking yeast for bumblebees carries yeast. And lots of them. So at crush, there will be natural fermentation. The problem is catawba, which harvests typically 2 weeks later than diamond. And since we do not back-sweeten, this is a nightmare. Sure enough, we were able to control the fermentation, taking the tank down to super cold. But you could taste some spritz / CO2 developing. In the end, we were able to save everything and we made a splendid semi-sweet white wine. The original juice was ruby red in color but the yeast metabolized all of the color compounds during fermentation, also known as anthocyanin. Refreshing, vividly light in color, just like Vignoles, which makes me think….hmmm.
We have always struggled with starlings and robins swooping in to eat our crop. They seem to believe there is an agreement — I grow the grapes, they eat the grapes. So we are absolutely vigilant in our defenses. In 2019, they definitely got more than their fair share and since birds live a long time and they teach, we needed to step it up.
Terroir is a French term that establishes the concept that the unique areas in which grapes are grown provide unique flavors to wines unto only that location. Slope, soil type, subsoil type, climate, and micro-climate all come into play. So does trellising techniques, any amelioration to the soils, you name it. Wines contain upwards of 1500 chemical compounds.
Normally, our whites are golden in color. Yet, this year, they are brilliantly clear, almost like water. That’s never happened. Nor has the bird’s system we utilized this year ever worked so well at keeping out the birds. We have an older system from Bird Gard but it really didn’t do much. After the 2019 obliteration of our crop, and with a minimal amount of crop due to the freezes, we needed to protect everything. The problem was I was looking rather late in the year to make a purchase, early July. I saw a very cool system out of England. Subsonic noises. Yeah, I’m all in. But can I get it in time? Loved the videos on lasers. Work fantastic. But what if I hit human and dog eyes? Not good. So back to Bird Gard I go. Guaranteed no bird damage? Seriously?!?! No, our system is better than it was 20 years ago, we guarantee it. After Google mapped our vineyard, they sent me their recommendation, the Bird Gard Super Pro Momba-Jomma deluxe package. The price? Um….really?!?!? Guaranteed? Um…okay!
BTW, Jim, you really ought to do something with those tree lines on the west side and that central location of wild blackberries — those are launch sites for the birds. Still, guarantee? Yep. Leaving them.
The problem with the old system and their lesser expensive system is the singular direction of the speakers. Like your stereo speakers — they are singular direction. “Me thinks” that was one of the problems with the old system — the birds figured out what was making the noise — they could see the source.
The new system is pole mounted 4 speakers pointing north, south, east, and west. And there are 4 systems in the vineyard, so 16 total speakers blaring in every direction. I thought I had to turn the system on daily, but I discovered on day 2 after installation that they have photo-electric, so the system shuts off at dark and comes on at dawn. Note to self, turn off the system if pending storms are coming through at night because lightning triggers them to sound off! So on day 2, I go out to turn on the four systems. System 1 is in Chambourcin. I turn it on and starlings fly out of Vignoles to my neighbor’s silo. What the heck is that, you could see them thinking. Then I walk over to system 2, in Vignoles and close to the silo. Boom, they take off. But they don’t go far. They must be thinking, what the heck???? So I walk over to system 3 in the diamond. The birds are in formation looking down at their feast trying to see what creature is eating birds. Where is it? I’m due south of their flying at system 3. As they turn north, I turn on system 3, so they get the noises now coming from the south and east of them. Yikes! They bug out. Then I nonchalantly walk over to system 4 in Frontenac, turn it on, and go about my day.
Terroir: Everything about the location affects the flavor of the wine. Well, we had zero bird damage this year. None. So no damaged berries going into winemaking. No bacteria for fungus laces berries going into fermentation. One of the world’s most expensive wines, Chateau D’Yquem, is made solely from damaged grapes.
So as I type this, I’m beginning to wonder if some bird damage is a good thing, adding complexity to the wines. It’s a crazy, convoluted thought but in 20 years of making Vignoles, we have never made crystal clear Vignoles. And we have never had bird damage.
I will be purchasing that system out of England in the springtime. The birds will wise up to Bird Gard at some point, so I need to stay ahead of them by hitting them with more and more tricks.
We, humans, have lived most of our entire existence in harmony and in fighting with nature. Wines have been drunk for thousands of years, all with insect and bird damage. It’s just a wondering thought right now if I need to be less vigilant. Lose crop, gain more complexity in wines. We’ll still keep the birds at bay for 2021 and if the white wines are brilliantly clear next year, then I’ll know. One year can be an anomaly. Two, then you got something.
Cabernet Franc 2019: We have been bottling 1 and 2-barrel blends all year long. For this final bottling, I added what we call Max’s Small Batch Red reserve wine into the bottling. Just a little, about 8%. Wow! Insane!!!
Chardonnay 2019: All chardonnay bottlings get screwed with. We’re adding something, 6% of this or 8% of that is usually the norm. The main reason is to boost acidity and increase the finish. The new release has 7% Vignoles and 6% traminette. Awesome!
Max’s Small Batch Red #59. This was tough because I was saving St. Croix for another blend, but it blended so well with cabernet sauvignon and the Max reserve that I had to, had to, put this wine together. Super intense flavors through and through. Complex as can be with a long, lingering finish.
Cheers, Jim
Updates from April 2020: Since the last update, we have added seven new wines to the list. At Turtle Run, we will blend across the spectrum of wines. We will try aging techniques that may never have been tried. Some of the things we do must be firsts for the wine industry. If there is an asterisk next to the wine, there is a high percentage chance that this process is perhaps new to winemaking or exceedingly rare.
* Max’s Small Batch Red #57. A blend of Cabernet Sauvignon 2015, 2017, 2018, Syrah 2019, St. Croix 2019. The rare air: Two of them. Three vintages of Cabernet Sauvignon in one wine and four total vintages. Find any winery anywhere that has tried that. Then there is the blending of St. Croix, what is called an interspecific hybrid variety into traditional vinifera varieties. The wine is incredibly smooth and complex. Try it out of multiple glasses to get the full experience. I’ve had wines over $100 and this wine is in that category.
* Painted Red 2019: The rare air: Blending interspecific hybrids with traditional vinifera varieties, this time Frontenac with Zinfandel. Totally works. It’s probably less rare of an idea but I haven’t run into any wineries doing it. The acids and fruit of Frontenac totally work with the more tannic Zinfandel. Lovely fruit, lovely complexity. Easy drinking dry red.
* Cabernet Franc 2019: The rare air: No one, absolutely no one could possibly have tried what we did to age this wine. We placed two barrels of franc on a pallet on December 8, 2019, rolled it outside, and didn’t do anything to the barrels until bringing them in on March 24, 2019. We violated all rules of aging wine. The barrels got rained and snowed on. Got sun too. And clouds. They got very cold and nearly hot which is why they came in on the 24th of March. The flavors are beyond spectacular. Who says that wine has to be aged in controlled temperatures with controlled humidity? Unless one has tried the opposite, one wouldn’t know, would one? The fruit is so, so, so darn up front and clean and refreshing. Like eating very, very fresh berries and the oak from the barrels is incredibly refined.
* Catherine’s Blend 2019: The rare air: Again the cross varietal blending, and in America, no sugar or juice is added. This wine is spectacularly fruity, a blend of Chardonnay, Vignoles, Riesling, Chardonel, and Geisenheim. The sweetness is very clean and refreshing. g. * Rhapsody in White 2019: The rare air: Yet again, cross varietal blending. For a dry white, this wine hits all the notes of awesome fruit and complexity. It’s a blend of 50% Chardonnay, 24% Vignoles, 24% Chardonel, and 2% Riesling. The finish is spectacularly long and the wine is incredibly refreshing.
Summer Solstice 2019: No asterisk here as it’s a simple blend of two hybrids, chardonel and traminette. It is one of the absolute favorites of our regular customers, especially our concert customers, so I am super happy that this wine is back on the wine list. It usually stays on the list for about 6 months and its claim to fame is its citrus notes. Somehow the spicy traminette and the apple-ish chardonel make quite the citrus blend.
Cheers, Jim
Updated February 2020: Time for dry reds: Syrah 2020 and Cabernet Sauvignon 2018
We have 3 vineyards, plus ours, that supply all of our grapes. The fun thing is each has weather variances which make the winemaking fun and exciting because I literally know that each vintage is going to be unique. Syrah, probably over the years, has really undergone perhaps the biggest variances, all good. But to think “A” that I could rush a syrah onto the market, and “B” do it without additives is “C” crazy!
I thought the Syrah grapes were exquisite when they arrived. Dark berries! Tasted great. We fermented and aged the wine on the syrah skins for 5 weeks, 3 weeks longer than the traditional American method of 2 days to 2 weeks, but right on, a little shorter time for us. The longer contact builds more body and character but sometimes the color can dissipate slightly. What we received was a wine that is much lighter in color after pressing, softer in tannins with great essences of the syrah grape. So it became a target for early entry on the wine list. It would, however, need some winemaking tricks to be ready in under 9 months. Now, here’s where we got a little tricky and broke from winemaking conventional wisdom. Bottled traminette! Yes, I wanted the dry traminette on the list and on my taste buds. I also wanted to introduce Winter Solstice, a blend of traminette and diamond.
Back to syrah. How is traminette involved with syrah? Did we add traminette to the syrah? Sort of, but not. Here’s where we probably broke international wine-making rule #8, or perhaps #1 or #2. Two things I tell people: if you want to make great wine, keep things very clean and keep oxygen out. So let’s look at cleanliness, or lack thereof to make a superb Syrah. This is not the first time I did this trick. In 2010, our chardonnay from that vintage was fermented in a dirty tank that had previously contained Vignoles. So let’s go over dirt! What we did was this: We bottled the traminette and Winter Solstice on the same day, gently pulling clean barrel fermented traminette from the barrels, leaving behind the lees or spent yeast cells of traminette. To preserve their freshness, we dosed the barrels with CO2. The following day, we heavy splashed syrah into the barrels, thus stirring up the spent traminette yeast cells into the very clean syrah, which made for a very cloudy syrah. Over time, the yeast re-settled to the bottom of the barrel. While settling, autolysis occurred. Autolysis is the process of yeast cell walls breaking down which allows the mannoproteins of the yeast to attach to tannins in the wine, thus softening the wine and adding smoothness and mouthfeel. We left the wine in the barrels for 3 months. For comparison, we tried the same syrah which we placed in clean barrels, and those clean barrels, my friend, are simply not ready. Now, I could have “gone chemical additive”…….yeah, um no. So we pulled off, using good old-fashioned, Old World techniques to help a wine get to market a little earlier without compromising the healthy ingredients in the wine, nor does it taste rushed.
Speaking of not rushing. Cabernet Sauvignon anyone? Eighteen months in oak. Gently filled from the top of the aging tank into the barrels. No autolysis. Just time. Pure intensity. As some of you know, I like to say “I have 10,502 taste buds,” and with that many taste buds, you’ll never see me ask for a bitter beer, like a stout or an IPA. Just isn’t happening. This is the most intense Cabernet we have ever made. Intense, dense, tannins that say “Hi.” But there is a great deal of balance within the wine. For those of you who have said “You have 2 taste buds,” this is your wine! What we did in fermentation comes full circle. In 2017, we used a process called “carbonic maceration” in which we sort of trick an anaerobic fermentation within the berry itself through CO2. So it’s a non-yeast fermentation. The free run juice was naturally fermented with yeast, but the core, the berries, were not. That made for a deliciously fruity, unique cab.
In 2018, I went “hardcore” for the cab. High temperature, right on the edge of the heat killing the yeast for bigger extraction. Six weeks on the skins with heavy press settings to squeeze out even more tannins. The goal was to blend it back with some 17 to make a spectacularly complex cab, which we did and to age some for the Max’s Small Batch Red program. The funny thing is we have pretty well sold through the 17/18 blend, thus necessitating the need to check on the 18. Dang! So if you like a really grippy, full-on cab, we have one. I haven’t made one this big, I don’t think, ever! I have tasted ones this big and rich at plus $50 a bottle though. We had the right grapes and I simply got darn lucky to have applied the perfect fermentation techniques to maximize what these grapes could give and used the right aging techniques to highlight the “big-ness” that this grape offered for winemaking.
I do have one barrel left of traminette-aged syrah which I am offering up to the Max’s Small Batch Red program, several “clean” ones which will take time to develop, and thankfully several more barrels of the cab. We did two barrel bottlings of each wine, so we are in good shape, inventory-wise, for syrah and cab.
Updated January 2020: The “My Mind” wines are bottled!
December was what we call a “My Mind” sell-out-a-thon kind of month. We literally sold out of nearly every one of them. Our wholesaler was screaming for them. I get it. Nothing like getting into the Christmas season with your top-selling wines not available. And since we have a huge following for these no sugar added wines, yeah, being out was a problem. There are four vineyards that produce the grapes for our winery, plus one in Lodi, CA, one in North East, PA, and one in upstate NY.
The “My Mind” grapes primarily come from our folks in Pennsylvania. Due to an early fall in their area, the struggle for ripening the grapes was real! As grapes ripen, not only do sugars increase but acids drop and flavor compounds develop. For some grape varieties, an earlier harvest provides better flavors than later harvests.
All of the grapes came into us at one time, concord, catawba, Steuben, Niagara, and riesling. Because all of these wines are reliant upon natural sweetness, no sugar or juice added after fermentation at bottling, etc, we had to watch the fermentations very carefully. And interestingly enough, which makes no sense whatsoever, or maybe it does, who knows, but our August and September fermentations absolutely fly, but the ones that started in late November, regardless of the juice temperature, seem to struggle. From August – September, we are literally freezing the fermenting wines to slow them down. November – December, practically heating them or at minimum, not cooling them down. In August – September, we can use temperature to guide the fermentation to the hour and day we want to filter the wines (that’s how we stop fermentation, we filter the yeast out on the hour of the day). For instance, a Wednesday at 10:00 AM to filter wine is very convenient. However, our November – December fermentations are on “their time”. This means 24-7 filtering, and several could be ready on the same day. One mid-December day, I filtered wine at 3:45 AM and followed up with another at 9:00 AM (then had an evening swim meet to coach — made the bus with 7 minutes to spare!).
Our Red My Mind is pure concord. Deliciously red grape all the way through.
Blue My Mind is pure Steuben and hits your taste buds with a combo of tropical fruits.
Lost My Mind is a very careful blend of catawba and concord and the blend totally rocks. The wine is very intense and bursts with great fruity flavors
Crossed My Mind (not on the wine list, but is a very smooth and inviting red wine). We do have stock of the wine, so ask for it. Our wholesaler pretty well purchased our entire bottling line of t
Slip My Mind is pure Niagara and it is crazy tasty.
Escape My Mind is a little drier and is a wine made by blending the juices of three of the following: Steuben, Concord, Niagara, and Catawba. Funny enough, you can’t blend finished wines to create these flavors. There is something about fermenting the juices together which unlocks flavors that I simply cannot get by post-blending wines.
Updated November 2019
I am going to try to remember to add the newest wines here monthly. Wish me luck!!!
Max’s Small Batch Red #56: I love Bordeaux Reds, the really grippy dry reds. I really like the Bordeaux Reds that are not only grippy (strong tannins) but ones with complex flavors and a rich mouthfeel. Number 56 checks the boxes, but it took blending to get me there. This wine is a distinctive blend of cabernet sauvignon 2015, 2017, and 2018, not the same blend as Max’s 55. Then I added 28% of fresh “field blended” st. croix, corot noir, noiret, and chamobourcin. We very lightly filtered this wine to maintain the amazing complexities so there is a chance your bottle may have some very light sediment in it. That is okay. Nothing wrong with a little sediment in wine from time to time.
Seyval Blanc 2018: Speaking of sediment, I decided, due to quantity we could not cold stabilize this wine before bottling. Cold stability removes excess tartaric acid and potassium through the process of creating a creme of tartar, also known as potassium bitartrate, which is used in cooking. But the process of cold stability can reduce the flavor compounds in wine too. This wine is both partial tank fermented and barrel fermented. The wine started in stainless steel and we flash filtered it to preserve some natural residual sugar. By adding it to oak and re-inoculating it with new yeast we were able to bring out a more fruit-forward version with some oak overtones, something that can’t quite be replicated if we barrel fermented.
Dry Traminette 2019: A blend of two barrels of traminette, fermented and finished dry in the barrels. Traminette packs a lot of fruity esters, so it’s easy to barrel ferment and keep a lot of fruit. We were kind of missing what I would call a clean and refreshing finish wine, and this one hits the spot.
Winter Solstice 2019: A new wine for us. What happens when you ask a customer on a Saturday on the fly, “Hey, would you like to blend an interesting white with me?” Yeah, we blend. This wine is a blend of traminette and diamond. Very few have heard of diamond, but it’s a fairly easy grape for us to grow and it produces a great, fruit-forward wine, typically sweet to semi-sweet to off dry. Blended together, we make a very refreshing white, with a good hint of oak. It can be hard to ascertain the sweetness, but it’s there.
Aside from sugar, want another way to avoid that nasty hangover? Don’t add tannins, keep fining agents at bay which can strip away micronutrients, and certainly avoid liquid oak.
And please do not worry about sulfites. That doesn’t cause headaches. Well, sulfites can, but you have to be a really bad winemaker for sulfites to cause a wine headache!!
For dry wines (and sweet too), we simply do not like additives. Modern winemakers have access to plenty of additives that are perfectly legal, from liquid oak to powdered tannins to all sorts of fining agents which are not used at Turtle Run. We talk to so many folks who can no longer drink dry reds due to headaches. Because our wines are based on grapes and aging in barrels, on lees (spent yeast cells) contact, with no oak or tannin additives, we get pure wine that keeps those headaches at bay. Many of the additives play with the anti-oxidant levels in wine and by default can add or expose histamines in the wines. And therein lies the problem – unnatural histamine and anti-oxidant levels in the wine.
Not sulfites. But wait? Urban legend says…Yes it does say that. So why add sulfites? Simple – keep the oxidation of the wine at bay, which keeps the wine fresh and fruity. Helps with aging too. BTW, wines that have been stripped, fined, and with all sorts of additives do not have the natural balance to age.
But the headache and other maladies tied with sulfites have to deal with a concept called bound in solution or volatile in solution. Volatile bad bound good. Huh?
When we clean equipment we use unbounded sulfur. Mixed with very hot water and citric acid, we create an awesome sterilizer and cleaner, one without any “harmful” chemicals. The staff knows fully well to stay away from the bucket. One smell and you lose your breath! It Burns the nose too!
Do any foods naturally contain sulfites? Yep. Most fruits and vegetables do. All bound! You can’t smell them and you can’t taste them. You don’t get sick with them. Or lose your breath either. Same with sound winemaking in which the parts per million are in solution at a low threshold that allows them to be an asset to the wine but yet cannot be sensitized by the consumer.
Just don’t smell the bucket if you’re in the winery on weekdays and we are cleaning. You’ll lose your breath. Sulfur has this not-so-wonderful ability to restrict our airways. For those that are asthmatic, that’s a huge concern. Olfactory senses are the issue and if the sulfur is volatile and not bound in solution, bingo, one smell and you have a constricted airway. Trust me!
Also, sometimes we get questions regarding sulfa allergies. Completely different. Sulfa is not sulfites. In summary, there are lots of “things” that can cause an allergic reaction, body type included. With wine, I very seriously doubt sulfites are causing any problems. Histamines absolutely are. Added tannins and fining agents disrupting the natural antioxidant levels I strongly believe are. Sugar is an absolute too, especially the glucose half of the sucrose molecule.
Excerpt taken from our September / October 2014 Email Newsletter
The New Wines of 2014 — A Little Luck, + a Lot of Work = Great Wines Forthcoming
For the first time in seemingly forever, we harvested our West Side Vignoles. Starlings normally graze the heck out of this section, but none were around this year (by the way, I hold starlings in high regard as a smart, very resourceful bird to get around my defenses). We took 180 gallons and barrel fermented it and whoa, does anyone remember barrel-aged Vignoles in 2004? Yeah, that’s what’s coming in sometime late spring.
Lots of Work: Our process of not adding sugar to dry wine to make sweet wine has pushed the staff and me to the brink. We had three wines come to the max limits on alcohol that we wanted — on the same day! Not fair! Who is managing the tank temperatures that caused this? That person needs to be on a performance improvement plan! Oh wait, that’s me. Uh-oh! I’m glad Catherine isn’t old enough yet to run this place. Whew!! But hey, it could have occurred on a concert Sunday, so we’ll take it! So why do we not take dry wine and add sugar? It’s certainly legal in America to do so. And, it’s certainly easier to make a sweet wine that way.
In Europe, it’s illegal. So I thought if they can make sweet wines without adding sugar, why can’t I? I want to compete with the best in the world, so it only makes sense that this would be the first step.
I personally like the flavor we get by making wine this way. To me, I find the sweetness to be clean and refreshing, with no sugary aftertaste at the end.
We did a study with the lab EMSL to see if there was something else. What we found was wines that were very low to non existent in glucose and much higher in fructose.
We were able to hypothesize afterwards that yeast will consume glucose over fructose, like a dog would rather consume a steak than dry dog food. We have heard customers tell us who were diabetic that they could enjoy our wines without a spike in their sugar levels. That would be pretty cool too, though that would be hard for me to verify. And if there are health benefits to making wine this way, I need to stick with it.
It would seem like this is a less caloric way of making wine too. Research shows that glucose contains 4 calories per gram and fructose contains 3. Another study shows that fructose is 2.2 times sweeter by taste than glucose and 1.72 times sweeter by taste than sugar. Thus, it would stand to reason that I could reduce my residual sugars and attain the same sweetness as if I added sugar. So perhaps there are other benefits that might help some folks.
So there you go!
And a big thanks to Gretchen and John for helping process Sangiovese grapes. Heaven forbid we ever make this wine again. What takes an hour to process cabenet franc takes 5 hours for Sangiovese. UGH!! But the wine tastes great, so what the hey!!!
Our mixed up screwed up vineyard came on board this year. This is the one that the kids will rip out when they find out what I did — mixed grape varieties to create a field blend. Dang it’s good. Gretchen, John, Christine, and I have tasted it and we don’t know what it tastes like, perhaps a pink pinot grigio with just hair bit of residual sugar. Currently the wine has been nicknamed “The Funky Co-Madina!
And traminette….whoa! Yeah, that’s a good one.
Now if you think I am dissing on the kids, I am not. I added them into this discussion to emphasize a point of uniqueness to Turtle Run Winery. We go to some crazy extra steps to create exceptional quality and unique wines for you, the consumer. We care about costs, to a point, but the point is to make great wine and not let accounting or an easy route get in the way. We are teaching the kids that hard work wins in the long run. No, I could easily see Max and Catherine being crazier and more adventurous than Laura and me. Maybe they’ll give me a raise when they take over!!! Yeah!!!!
INDY INTERNATIONAL WINE COMPETITION’S 2014 INDIANA FARM WINERY OF THE YEAR — TURTLE RUN WINERY!
Typing this while with a glass of Painted Red, all the while savoring a big award, — INDIANA WINERY OF THE YEAR — by the INDY INTERNATIONAL WINE COMPETITION! Whoa!!!!!
Just created this year — an award for wineries in Indiana that produce less than 50,000 gallons, which is a vast majority of us.
While we are all jazzed up over this award, you won’t see much fanfare on the wines that brought this award home. We preach at Turtle Run to like the wines you like, at the temperature you like, with the food that you like, in the glass shape you like. Due to individual’s taste bud count and past flavor experiences, what anyone likes is completely individualized. Before I truly understood this concept, many years ago, I listed our medals on our tasting sheet and poured one of those big, bold dry gold medal winning reds to a super sensitive taste bud gal who loved sweet, and whoa!! Oops!!! No more medals listed on our tasting sheet.
However, since I’m “Pimpin’ the Turtle”, I’ll mention the wine that “did it” — Estate Bottled Chambourcin 2012. I thought our 2012 was one of our best 4 vintages we have grown: 2000, 2007 and 2010 are the others in the big 4. To me, this wine is just flat out balanced! Nice densely balanced fruit. Nicely balanced tannins, nicely balanced oak, nicely balanced finish. I just like it..a lot! Always have. And it grabbed a Concordance Double Gold — the equivalency of the US Supreme Court reaching a unanimous decision. Apparently a ton of points goes to one of these gems and we got em! So if you like dry reds, give our 2012 Chambourcin a try.
As an aside, as president of the Indiana Uplands Wine Trail, the combined haul of medals from the trail was 93 — over 40% of the total medals taken by Indiana wineries! And we represent 11% of the total amount of wineries! So hop on the Indiana Uplands Wine Trail for some amazing, amazing wines!!
Ahh…but back to the Painted Red. First made in 2004, Painted Red is our full to medium bodied dry red with great, medium tannins and full fruit. Our 2013 is a blend of cab franc, cab sauvignon, corot noir, noiret, some zinfandel and pinot noir. I am trying this dry red slightly chilled. It’s delicious! Intense…but not (I know, that’s weird). So fruity. Just a hint of oak. Just dandy! I love that finish. It’s 20 seconds since my last sip and I am still tasting a lingering set of flavors. That’s right up my alley.
Also included in this email is information about Tour De Pork, the bicycle tour that starts and ends here on Saturday. And the Ron Jones Jazz Quartet will be here to serenade the riders when they return! If you don’t ride, come out anyway for some great music. And, there’s something special about the music from Ron this time.
We list our Fall Concert Series too in this email And, of course, new wines! And our upcoming grape harvest!!!
Typing this while enjoying a glass of Le Subereux aux Pinot De Corton….While celebrating our best ever showing at the Indy International Wine Competition! This wine was one of our “X” factor wines we entered – barrel fermented Vignoles. I just don’t know of any wineries who have ever barrel fermented or barrel aged Vignoles. So what would the judges think? And since Indy International has a Vignoles category, I couldn’t “hide” it in another category. For instance, The Consumer Choice Wine Competition in Sacramento doesn’t have a Vignoles category as the grape is not grown in California, so we had to find a non-variety category to have it judged. We entered it in Indy because it medaled out there, so why not here? But after sending it on its way, I thought to myself, “You dummy. Barrel fermented Vignoles doesn’t really taste like Vignoles. How is it going to medal?” I entered it because as I type this, I’m enjoying a glass. The oak has a lovely balance to it. The fruit. The acids. The finish. It’s all there…for me! So cheers! This wine has now won two medals at two different competitions!
2015 Indy International Wine Competition
So here’s the breakdown.
Favorite Medals of all time: Best in Class! Meaning we had the best wine in that category. Slip My Mind won Niagara and Lost My Mind won Blended American!!!
Second Favorite Medal: Double Gold! This means that 100% of two sets of judges gave it a gold medal. Blue My Mind and Lost My Mind
Third Favorite Medal; Gold Medal! Slip My Mind and Joe’s Jammin’ Red
Fourth Favorite Medal: Silver Medal! Red My Mind, Crossed My Mind, Traminette, White Chambourcin, Chardonnay, Le Subereux Aux Pinot De Corton, Max’s Small Batch Red #43.
Skin of our Teeth Medal: Bronze Medal! Chardonel and The Mammatus.
No Glory Wines: Entered but no medal. Serendipity (which won Best in Class at California’s Consumer Choice Wine Competition), Catherine’s Blend (medal winner at California’s Consumer Choice Wine Competition), and Forever More
Notes: This is the first time we have entered our no sugar added sweet wines. You love the clean refreshing finish, I love the clean, refreshing finish, and the judges do too! We simply didn’t enter many dry reds, categories we have traditionally done well with. We were already over budget on entries, so something had to stay home. Forever More – I should not have entered it. It’s too unique of a wine and when you can’t find a category in which it fits, find something else. We are not sure what happened with Catherine’s Blend or Serendipity, both winners in California. Oh well. We wanted to see what the My Mind wines would do, and voila!
Picking the wines outside of the My Mind wines: Thank you Christine and Hunter for your valuable insights!
Joe’s Jammin Red: First wine in after the My Minds. I thought this would be a gold medal winner and it won.
Traminette: Second wine in. In Indiana if you have a traminette and you are entering wines, it’s just something you do.
White Chambourcin: Third wine in. This new bottling is sensational to me!
Serendipity: Fourth wine in. Sure fire gold medal winner as it was a best in class in California. Oh well….
Chardonel: I love the complexity in ours. I thought it would score. We’ll take the Bronze.
Chardonnay: This was Hunter’s wine entry. He convinced me it would win, and sure enough!!!
The Mammatus: This was Christine’s wine entry. She said it would absolutely win. And sure enough!!!
Max’s Small Batch Red #43: Per Hunter and Christine. “Aren’t we entering dry reds?” “Oh crap!”
Forever More: Jim’s entry. Hunter – “The color is too um..not blush.” Christine – “I don’t see a category.” Jim – It’s either going to win the whole show or not medal.” Hunter –“So Enter Cabernet Franc!” Christine – “Enter another red, like Cabernet Franc….or Syrah.” Hunter – “Sub out Forever More and Chardonel for Franc and Syrah” Christine – “Yeah, do that. And enter Sangiovese.” Hunter – “Sub out Mammatus for Syrah.” Christine—“Yeah, what do we do with Sangiovese?” Jim—“Um….budget folks!” “What about ‘Suby’?” Christine – “We need more dry reds. That’s our calling card. That’s our reputation.” Hunter – “We got good dry reds.” Jim – “I know, we always win with reds. Heck we won a major trophy last year with dry reds. And that’s what we always enter. Why don’t we see what our other wines do? Let’s try something that is not a safe, sure bet.”
Do you see how these conversations go? I thought Forever More would flop or bring fortune. I shouldn’t have taken that chance –barrel aged off dry blend whose own unique color is Christine and Hunter were right. We had some great reds left “On Deck”, and I was gambling greatly with Forever More. Then again, we gambled with “Suby” as I call the wine, and it garnered a silver medal.
Overall, Laura, the staff, and I are very excited about this success. We thank you for your support too, for without you purchasing the wine, and “pimpin’ the turtle” by promoting our wines to your friends, we couldn’t keep doing what we are passionate about – as our motto says “Making Exceptional Quality Wine that goes with Food and Friends.”
