WINEMAKING / TASTING NOTES
None of our sweet wines have any added sugar to them, which is not typical in America. We captured all of the residual sugar in this wine by filtering the wine during fermentation to remove the yeasts. This allows the natural sweetness of the wine grapes to provide clean, delicious sweetness up front, without a sugary aftertaste! All fruit, all of the time! Fermentation is done very cold which not only helps us maintain the sugar levels to exactly what we want by fermenting the juice very cold, but cold fermentation also helps capture the very fruity essences in the wine. The resulting wine contains sweetness from fructose and not glucose, which helps us provide a much lower calorie wine for you. Check out our blog site to see why we don’t add sugar.
In 2018, we sacrificed our small crop of Steuben to the birds. We didn’t have much and if their interest in Stueben kept them out of the rest of the vineyard, fine. Works for me. The year 2019 was much different. A perfect spring with zero chance of a late frost allowed for a full crop across our entire vineyard. Then a local farmer didn’t pay attention to his spray guide and sprayed dicamba. It drifted into our vineyard and knocked out over half of our crop.
Then at ripening the birds came. Hundreds and hundreds. My boom box radio trick which had worked for years was utterly useless to these birds. Game on in 2020. So when we were harvesting traminette and I saw more than a hundred robins swarm into our Steuben vineyard, I grabbed the shotgun, told the folks harvesting traminette, no worries, and shot a few scare shots off into the Steuben vineyard. Birds got the heck out. After picking traminette, a few strong souls headed to the Steuben vineyard and we picked the entire vineyard. Our revenge against the robins!
For 2020, we got nailed with freezes on April 14th, April 15th, and May 8th. OUCH! So we knew we were field blending a sweet wine, meaning we would have harvested over 4 weeks to build this tank, so we had to keep fermentation in check. Somewhat easy / somewhat hard. Go cold, don’t add yeast. That is until we got to the diamond grape, which due to its nature, attracts yeast-carrying insects such as bumble bees and wasps.
Three weeks after picking the diamond we finally got the catawba into the tank, so the blend ended up as Steuben, traminette, diamond, and catawba. But here’s the neat thing. We never added yeast, and never let the temperature climb above 34 degrees, except for the addition of juices from the vineyard. There was no airlock so to speak, yet the tank never exploded from carbon dioxide. Amazing. The fermentation occurred at an extremely low temperature. We flash filtered it and bottled it! Delish!!
For our 2021, with Bird Gard blaring away, we don’t worry so much about the birds anymore. High tech revenge!!! We concentrated the blend to our Steuben and Catawba vineyards and the wine came out deliciously white. We have toyed with adding some of our sweet Frontenac to the blend, and we could for future bottlings, but right now the wine is deliciously fruity, white and bursting with tropical fruit and apple flavors.
For 2022, the wine is white as can be. A blend of our Steuben and Catawba vineyards, the tropical fruit flavors just explode in on the taste buds. Super smooth, and sweeter than the 2021.
This is a rock star of sweet wine. Flavors just bounce and bounce, keeping the palate guessing and wondering what flavor is coming next.
WINE SPECS
Variety: Steuben and Catawba| Vintage 2022| Vineyard: Turtle Run Vineyards, Indiana Uplands American Viticulture Area | Acid 0.75 | PH 3.67| Alcohol 9.5% | Residual Sugar 3.5% | Grams Glucose 0 | Grams Sucrose 0 | Grams Fructose 14 | Calories Fructose per bottle 42
Price: $14 per bottle