Showing posts with label Blackberry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blackberry. Show all posts

Friday, March 28, 2014

#VirtualVines with Old York Cellars & Laurie's Chocolates

Last night Old York Cellars hosted their quarterly #VirtualVines online tasting; this time featuring their Stagecoach Red & Blackberry wines along with everyone's favorite chocolate maker, Laurie Douglas from Laurie's Chocolates. Winemaker Scott Gares started the tasting by introducing the Stagecoach Red ($16), a part of their seconday Stagecoach label named to honor the transportation service which passed through the area on its route between Philadelphia and NYC. The  Stagecoach Red is a blend of Malbec 50%, Cabernet Sauvignon 25%, and Merlot 25%.  It took his team seven iterations of different wines and percentages to create this final blend and the result is a fruit forward, very approachable wine. Besides being fruity, it has smooth tannins with a touch of spice (black pepper) on the finish.  The suggested food pairing was tomato pizza and turkey burger and the chocolate pairing was dark chocolate with almonds. Laurie always recommends that the wine be sweeter than the chocolate and the little extra sea salt further mellowed the wine and reduced the bitterness in the chocolate and almonds. 

Moving to the Blackberry ($12), it's marketed as a dessert wine, but at 4% RS isn't as sweet as you would think. Gares stops the fermentation a little early in order to keep some of the natural sugars in the berries and the result is a wine that tastes exactly like a blackberry. The initial flavor is sweet blackberry fruit, but the finish is more tart which acts like acidity to balance the sugar. This is quite a tasty wine - and with chocolate - Laurie paired this with the Venezuela Single Origin 65% - one of here many single origin chocolates.  Once again, I find myself impressed with Old York Cellars - need to take a road trip soon with theCompass app and visit. Cheers.

Friday, April 6, 2012

Keel And Curley Winery - Blueberry Farming to Wine

While the family was enjoying Legoland, in Winter Haven Florida, I snuck out to visit the nearest winery, Keel And Curley Winery. The winery is just outside of Tampa Bay and provides residents and tourists an opportunity to taste local fruit wine as well as live music on occasion. Blueberry farmer, Joe Keel, started the winery in 2003 as a way to utilize unharvested fruit. In the blueberry industry, many blueberries remain on the bush when the cost of picking additional units is equal or less than the wholesale price received. Keel didn't want to mess with jams or pies, so he started making wine at home. As he learned and defined his craft - Keel And Curley Winery was born.

Blueberry wine is still central to their operation as they produce three styles: dry, semi-dry, and sweet. And last year they introduced two blackberry wines, dry and sweet. All these wines are made from 100%. Although the sweeter wines are their best sellers, I preferred the dry versions of both wines. They retained the fruit characters of the blueberry and blackberry and could easily pass for a medium bodied red wine such as Chambourcin.

Keel and Curley Winery also produces a series of fusion wines where grape juice sourced on the open market is co-fermented with different fruit juices. These wines are all semi-sweet to sweet, and to me are basically gimmicks marketed to tourists. And I've fallen and purchased the Key West – Key Lime in the past. Best used as a Margarita base. And my traveling partner fell for the Tangerine Zinfandel. Yes, gimmicks sell. But if you come across their wines at Publix or at the winery - I recommend the dry 100% Blueberry or Blackberry.