WINEMAKING / TASTING NOTES
This is a fun wine to make, or at least the first vintage was fun to make. The origins of this wine are pretty funny. We were selling one of our sweeter wines too rapidly in the summer manyyears ago, so I took a look at my tank inventory and the staff and I started to blend this “defensive bottling” of a wine to basically slow down the sales of another. The next thing you know, the stores started placing orders for this “one and done” wine. Fast forward to today, this sweet blend of catawba, and concord, but mainly catawba is a mainstay of our sweet wine list and exceptional and precise care takes place when we blend Lost My Mind.
The wine itself contains a cornucopia of all sorts of sweet fruity flavors. I pick up hints of strawberry, cherry, lemon, grape, and probably a few others. The residual sugar is all natural from the grapes as we arrest fermentation by freezing and filtering the wine to capture purely clean sweetness with no sugary aftertaste.
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 more 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 2020 | Varietal Catawba 61%, Concord 4%1 | Appellation: North East, PA
Acid 0.77 | PH 3.55| Alcohol % 9.5| Residual Sugar 3% | Grams Glucose 0 | Grams Sucrose 0| Grams Fructose 12 | Calories of Fructose per bottle 36
Aging stainless steel
Price: $14 per bottle