WINEMAKING / TASTING NOTES
When blending American grape varieties (concord, catawba, Steuben, Delaware, Niagara, isabella, and edelweiss come to mind), each variety provides both complimentary and dominant flavor profiles.  What does that mean?  A little too much of one pretty well wipe out the flavors of the other or others.  Thus when blending these wines, the need to be precise and concise is of incredible importance.  And considering how we blend them — bottle some of one, then start blending into the tank the other components, the risk of overshooting an addition severs a few nerves as we do it.

Crossed My Mind 2021 is a blend of Niagara and concord.  We pull records of past blend varieties and ratios and with tasting glasses and a pipet, we get to work.  Varieties used in the past vintages include concord, Niagara, edelweiss, and Steuben.

This is a crazy delicious sweeter wine with notes of both Concord and Niagara shining through.  For the concord fans, this wine’s a real treat for you’ll definitely taste concord, but then you’ll say to yourself, “There’s something else” and that something else is Niagara.

For all of our sweet wines, we follow European laws and traditions and do not add sugar at bottling, but rather rely on arrested fermentation and the fruit’s natural sugars.  Yeah, they’re lower in alcohol, but lower alcohol wines allow for the fruity flavors to shine through. We ferment these wines at the seemingly impossible temperature of 34-36 degrees Fahrenheit (we found a yeast that can do it after searching for 3 plus years) which allows for very slow fermentation.  This slow fermentation doesn’t allow the fruity esters to escape in the atmosphere, and it allows us to filter away the yeast at the exact time the wines have what we taste is the right residual sugar and alcohol concentrations.

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 Niagara and Concord| Appellation: Pennsylvania grapes, Lake Erie
Acid 0.77 | PH 3.51 | Alcohol % 9.3 | Residual Sugar 3.5% | Grams Glucose 0| Grams Sucrose 0 | Grams Fructose 14 | Fructose calories per bottle 42

Price: $14 per bottle

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