WINEMAKING/TASTING NOTES
Blue My Mind is made from the Steuben grape, one of the many off-springs in the American hybrid grapes originating from Catawba. If you have ever had red grape juice, it’s made from Concord, an offspring of Catawba, or white grape juice from Niagara, it too comes from the Catawba family tree.
The secret to Blue My Mind is in the processing of the grapes. Most wineries that I know of do not leave the American hybrid varieties on the skins for any length of time, rather, it’s de-stem, crush, then press. The first time I tasted the Steuben grape, I thought there was a lot of potential in the skins. Since it would be a new wine to our wine list several years ago, I thought, what the heck, let’s see what skin contact does.
We also grow Steuben and our Steuben grapes go into a wine we call “Robin’s Revenge.”
I have a friend in Pennsylvania that grows these grapes for us and has for years. Right along the coast of Lake Erie.
The skins of Steuben yield incredible fruit-forward flavors of strawberry, grapefruit, very ripe cherry, and lemon notes. We ferment the wine extremely cold over several months, then when the alcohol and residual sugar reach the perfect point, we filter the wine, leaving only natural residual sugar in our wines. At Turtle Run, we never back-sweeten our wines with either sugar, juice, or juice concentrate.
Adding sugar to sweeten wine is a common, traditional practice in the United States, probably originating from the home winemaker scene. At Turtle Run, we explored scientifically to see if there is a difference between arrested fermentation wine, the way Europe and Turtle Run do it, versus sugar added to wine, the American way. First, wines with sugar added have half of their sweetness provided by glucose. Arrested fermentation wines have little to no glucose left behind as the yeast seem to prefer to consume glucose before metabolizing fructose into alcohol. Because fructose is far sweeter than glucose and because arrested fermentation wines have less alcohol, we can drop our calorie count by over 50% over sugar-added wines. Because many more maladies to humans are tied to the overconsumption of glucose, such as diabetes, hypertension, inflammation, and cancer growth, we think our pain in the rear method of winemaking provides a better product for the consumer. And arrested fermentation wines have a clean, refreshing aftertaste, not a cloying, syrupy sugar aftertaste.
WINE SPECS
Vintage 2022| Varietal Steuben | Appellation Lake Erie, PA
Acid 0.66| PH 3.53| Alcohol 9.4% | Residual Sugar 3.2% | Glucose Grams 0 | Sucrose Grams 0 | Fructose Grams 14 | Calories of Fructose per Bottle 42
Aging stainless steel
Price: $14 per bottle