WINEMAKING / TASTING NOTES
Seyval Blanc was one of the first dry white wines I made back in 2000. Laura absolutely loved it. We then made a few more vintages in our earlier years but, due to logistics in our winery, we just weren’t able to make it for nearly 15 years. Oh well…
In the summer of 2018, I realized two things: first, we were running low on dry whites and we’d run out sometime late fall, or at least not have as big of a wine list as I’d like. Second, the effects of dicamba drift from a nearby farm did indeed wipe out a vast amount of our crop. So I called one of my buddy growers in New York, thinking just maybe, maybe, he’d have some excess juice sitting in extreme cold storage. Sure enough, yep! Seyval Blanc? You’re kidding. Do you have some? Definitely interested.
We started the fermentation in stainless steel and super cold fermented it as we do for all of our sweet wines. We cold filtered the wine, leaving behind about 3% residual sugar. To older oak barrels the wine went, where we knew hibernating yeast could possibly be lurking in the staves. Sure enough, the wine started to continue fermenting extremely slowly in oak, exactly what we wanted. We aged this wine for 3 years and 8 months in oak before bottling on 3/21/2023.
oasted apples are the primary fruit, but it is the well integrated oak that just pops. We added 10% of our sweet 2021 geisenheim to the blend which really, really smooths out the wine. A very long, lingering, super smooth aftertaste awaits. Not too many grapes can handle this kind of oak aging. Seyval can, and the flavors thrive from it. On the lees, or spent yeast cells really added to the smoothness in this wine.
Seyval Blanc is a French-American hybrid grape, which, its claim to fame, has been and probably still is, the number one grape variety grown by acreage in England!
Aged 3 years in oak, and yes, you can taste the oak, but the wine isn’t overly oaky. Just balanced
WINE SPECS
Vintage 2018 | Varietal Seyval Blanc | Appellation: Finger Lakes, NY
Acid 0.73 | PH 3.51| Alcohol 11.90% | Residual Sugar 0% |
Aging stainless steel and older oak barrels
Price: $16 per bottle