Odds and Ends - Turina Wines Edition (Marzemino, Friulano, Schioppetino and sparkling Groppello/Marzemino)

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Odds and Ends, where I write about interesting wines that I've tried lately which I don't think merit a full post on their own.  All of the wines I'll be writing about today are made from grapes that I've already written extensively about in the past and those relevant links will be included in each write-up.  Additionally, all of the wines I'll be looking at today are imported by my good friend Paul Turina, whose new and improved company website can be perused here.  I profiled Paul and his company about a year ago (read here) and have since tried a handful of wines from various producers that he imports.  All of the wines I'll be writing about below were provided to me as samples by Paul, but all opinions expressed are entirely my own and I have received no compensation for any of the reviews below other than the wines themselves.

About a month after I first met Paul, I was introducing him to some people in the Boston area to try and get his wines distributed here (he is still looking for a Massachusetts distributor, so if anyone is interested, please email him).  One of the wines he poured at a meeting that I accompanied him to was this sparkling pink wine made by some distant relatives of his around Lake Garda in Italy.  I wasn't able to get a note written on the wine (unlike the sparkling Turbiana he also brought which I wrote about here), but I remember enjoying it quite a bit.  I asked him a few weeks ago if he still had any around and he said he had a few bottles from a recent shipment.  He handed the bottle off to me the next time he was in town and I promptly popped the cork on it.  It's a non-vintage, tank-fermented sparkling wine that is made from about 50% Groppello and 50% Marzemino and retail on the bottle (from Paul's website) is about $17.   In the glass the wine was a medium salmon pink color with fine steady bubbles.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of fresh cut strawberry, red cherry, watermelon and pink bubblegum.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity.  It was dry and tasted like cut watermelon and strawberries with a touch of red cherry.  It finished with a clean, almost quinine-like bitterness.  It's a fun wine, but it's well structured enough to be serious as well.  I drank it around Valentine's Day and it's the perfect wine for that occasion.

His distant Italian relatives not only make wines from Groppello and Turbiana, but also from the Marzemino grape, which I wrote about around a year and a half ago.  Paul recently let me try his family's 2009 Marzemino from the Brescia region of Lombardy on the western shore of Lake Garda.  In the glass the wine was a medium purple ruby color.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of sour cherry, blackberry, cocoa powder and leather.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with high acid and fairly soft tannins.  There were flavors of tart cherry, blackberry, old dusty leather, black plum and cocoa powder.  It was a little lean, but it made up for it with a nice, bright, racy streak of acidity.  As I said in my previous post, Marzemino seems like a grape tailor-made for tomato sauces and pizza.  I had this wine with a big plate of spaghetti and it was a near perfect match.  While I'm not as fond of Marzemino in general as Don Giovanni was, I do like it in the right circumstances and this is a very well made example.

Paul imports wine from a number of different regions in Italy and from a number of different producers.  I've taken a look at some of his producers making wines from Vespaiola, Grechetto and Sagrantino in the past, but today I'd like to take a look at a couple of wines from a producer he works with in Friuli called Petrussa.  Petrussa is located in the Colli Orientali del Friuli region of northeastern Italy and they deal with many of the grapes that are common to that region.  One of them is Friulano, which we took a look at about a year ago.  This particular bottling is from the 2009 vintage.  In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was fairly reserved with aromas of white pear, lilac and eucalyptus.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly low acidity and a kind of oily mouthfeel.  There were flavors of eucalyptus, pear and lime with a kind of stewed vegetable quality that I find in many of the wines made from the Friulano grape.  This is a well-made wine, but it's a grape that I just can't fall in love with.

The next wine from Petrussa that I tried was made from the Schioppettino grape, which I did like quite a bit when I was able to try it before.  This particular wine was from the 2008 vintage and in the glass it was a medium purple ruby color.  The nose was moderately intense with aromas of black cherry, plum, fresh turned earth, damp leaves and leather.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with high acidity and soft tannins.  There were flavors of tart cherry, blackberry, old leather and wet leaves.  Right after the cork was pulled, the wine was searingly, almost abrasively sour but it does round out a bit as it settles into the glass.  It's bright and zippy the whole time, though, so fans of high-acid red wines probably need not apply here.  The bright, tart fruits are really well balanced by the damp earthy flavors and the wine reminds me a bit of an electrified Pinot Noir.  It needs food and it needs high acid food so anything with tomato sauce would go quite nicely here.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Channing Daughters "Meditazione," Long Island, NY, USA

After a very long hiatus, we're back with another installment of Weird Blend Wednesday!  Today I'd like to take a look at a wine that has a lot of interesting weird stuff going for it.  Not only are the grapes a little bit unusual, but the region and the style of this wine are a little out of the ordinary as well.

Channing Daughters winery is located on the south fork of Long Island, which the wealthier among you may know as the Hamptons.  For those unfamiliar with the geography of Long Island, the end of the island that is farthest away from New York City (and which is accessible via a short ferry ride from New London, Connecticut) is forked at the end (see a map here).  The north fork has historically been dominated by farmland, but over the past few decades, many people have started growing grapes and opening up wineries.  There are a few dozen wineries now on the north fork of Long Island making wines of varying quality levels from grapes like Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Chardonnay, among others.  The south fork has generally been a resort area for wealthy New Yorkers to keep a summer home, but there are just a handful of wineries, like Channing Daughters, that are located on the south fork of Long Island.

Though they're located on the south fork of the island, Channing Daughters sources grapes from all over the eastern end of Long Island, and they bottle wines from each of its three designated AVAs (North Fork, Hamptons, and Long Island).  The winery owns plots on both forks and also sources grapes from particular growers all over the island to make their wines, which are as varied and eclectic as I think I've ever seen from a single producer.  They have single vineyard wines and multi-vineyard blends, varietal wines and multi-grape blends, wines made from natural yeasts as well as wines made with cultivated yeasts, wines that are fined and filtered and wines that aren't, wines aged in any and every kind of oak barrel as well as wines done in 100% stainless steel.  The winery produces about 7000 cases of wine per year which is divided between twenty six different bottlings.

The wine that I picked up from them was their 2007 Meditazione, which is a wine made in the style of the "vino de meditazione" of the Friulia region of Italy.  This bottle was a blend of 35% Tocai Friulano, 35% Sauvignon Blanc, 13% Muscat Ottonel, 12% Pinot Grigio and 5% Pinot Bianco.  Channing Daughters has been making this wine for six years (the 2007 is actually the fourth vintage), and the particulars of it change from year to year.  The 2008, for example, was 27% Sauvignon Blanc, 27% Chardonnay, 16% Tocai Friulano, 16% Muscat Ottonel and 14% Pinot Grigio, while the 2009 is 27% Sauvignon Blanc, 6% Chardonnay, 1% Malvasia, 38% Muscat Ottonel, 26% Pinot Bianco and 2% Pinot Grigio.  The wine is made in an orange wine style, meaning that the juice is left in contact with the skins for some time after crushing, but even the timing of this varies from year to year.  I'm not sure how much time the 2007 spent on the skins, but the 2008 spent 10 days while the 2009 spent 30 days.  The wine is typically aged for about 18 months in Slovenian oak prior to bottling.  It has been called the greatest white wine in America by at least one prominent sommelier and inspired this comic and post from the always excellent wakawakawinereviews.

I picked up my bottle of the 2007 Meditazione from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for about $30.  In the glass the wine was a deep orange-bronze color.  The nose was intensely aromatic with peach, orange blossom, honeysuckle, pineapple and lime notes.  It had a heady, gorgeous perfume that made it difficult to move on to the step of actually tasting the wine.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and little bit of tannic grip.  I made the mistake of storing this bottle in the refrigerator and initially tried to taste it when it was very cold.  In this condition, it was no fun at all to drink, but once I let it come down to room temperature, the palate blossomed with rich apricot, honey and orange peel flavors along with some toasted nuts, flower petals, and sawdust.  There was a kind of savory salinity to the wine as well.  I wasn't blown away by this at first sip, but by the time I finished the bottle, I was moony-eyed in love with it.  I was able to pick up another bottle and drank it recently with some of the guys from the Wine Bottega, and my impressions were pretty similar.  This is an amazing, mind-blowing, incredible wine that is worth not only the $30 that I paid for these bottles, but easily worth the $40 that the new vintage is commanding from the winery.  I don't know if it's the best wine made in America, but it's definitely one of the most interesting.  I'm hoping to drop down to the winery in the next few months and try some of their other wines and chat with the winemaker a bit, so stay tuned for more about these guys and the amazing things that they're doing.

Friulano - Friuli, Italy and Goriška Brda, Slovenia

There's a lot to be confused about when it comes to the Friulano grape.  First of all, there's the fact that, historically, virtually no one has called it Friulano.  Traditionally it was known as Tocai or Tocai Friulano in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy or as Tocai Italico in the Veneto region where the grape is thought to have originated (though this may or may not be a different grape altogether).  The name was banned in 2007, though, because Hungary was able to convince the EU that the name Tocai may cause some confusion with their great sweet wine, Tokaji, which Friulano has absolutely nothing to do with, at least not anymore.  There's a theory that perhaps Furmint, the grape used in the Hungarian Tokaji, was the original grape used for a wine known as Tocai Friulano, but that certainly isn't the case today.  There's also a theory that some Friulano vines may have been brought into Hungary as a result of a 17th Century marriage between a Venetian princess and a Hungarian count, but regardless of whether either story is true or not, we do know that Friulano is not used in the modern day production of Tokaji and has no relation to any of the grapes that are.

There was some confusion about just what the grape would be called when the EU naming restriction came into effect in 2007 since there were a handful of other names that were somewhat widely used.  Two of the most widely used alternate names were Sauvignonasse and Sauvignon Vert (which is also sometimes a synonym for Furmint, confusingly enough), which might suggest some kind of a familial relationship to Sauvignon Blanc, but it turns out that there isn't one.  The two vines do resemble each other quite a bit, though, and this similarity has caused some notable confusion through the years.  At some point, though no one is quite sure when, some of the Tocai vines made their way into France, either from the Veneto or from Friuli, and eventually into Bordeaux, where they were mistaken for Sauvignon Blanc and planted among the Sauvignon Blanc vines already there.  When some of the Bordeaux vineyards sent cuttings from their fields over to Chile in the 19th Century, cuttings of Friulano made the trip as well since the proprietors were unaware of the mix-up in their vineyards.  Phylloxera eventually killed off the Friulano vines in Bordeaux, which were replanted with the correct Sauvignon Blanc vines in the aftermath, but since Phylloxera never came to Chile, the mistake persisted until the 1990's when some visiting ampelographers noticed the Friulano vines amidst the Sauvignon Blanc vines in many of the Chilean vineyard sites.  Most of those vines have been pulled up since then and planted with true Sauvignon Blanc vines so that total planting figures for Friulano in Chile (where it is called Sauvignon Vert ) stood at less than 200 hectares by 2000.

Friulano is also somewhat widely grown in Slovenia (where it was historically known as Tokaj), which is just to the east of Friuli.  The border between Friuli and Slovenia is fuzzier than in many other places and there is a distinctive mix of cultures around where the two countries meet.  There are actually a few Italian DOC areas whose borders extend onto Slovenian soil, which is a situation that I'm not aware of anywhere else on earth.  There is an ancient wine making history in the area where Slovenia is now situated, but it's a bit difficult to speak of a Slovenian wine tradition since the country has only existed as a sovereign nation since 1991.  It was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until that country was dissolved after World War I.  In December of 1918, it was included as part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which became the Republic of Yugoslavia in 1943.  Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991 with mercifully little bloodshed and was recognized by the EU as an independent nation in 1992 and accepted as a member by the UN very shortly thereafter.

The first Friulano based wine that I tried was the 2008 Quattro Mani "toh-kai" from the Goriška Brda region of Slovenia.  Goriška Brda is an extension of the Collio region of Friuli onto Slovenian soil, meaning that it is very close geographically and traditionally to Italy.  I picked this wine up for about $10 from my friends at Bin Ends.  In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was moderately intense with lovely aromas of pineapple, white flowers, peaches and mint leaves.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There were light pear, pineapple and lemon fruit flavors with a distinct and somewhat aggressive kind of vegetal and herbaceous edge to it.  There was a kind of stewed asparagus and tarragon character that I wasn't a particular fan of.  The nose was wonderfully fresh and perfumed but the palate just didn't follow through enough for me.  Wines made from Friulano are generally meant to be drunk young and this could have been a bit past its prime.

The second wine that I tried was the 2009 Bastianich "Adriatico" Friulano from the Friuli region of Italy.  I also picked this wine up at Bin Ends for about $13.  In the glass this wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was reserved with peach and pear fruit along with some honeysuckle flower, orange blossom and marzipan.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  There were flavors of peach and orange fruit with a touch of honeysuckle flower.  There was also a touch of fennel to this wine, but the vegetal edge wasn't nearly as pronounced as in the prior wine.  Peaches were really the dominant flavor component with a some really nice flowery honeysuckle to boot.  I could have personally used a bit more acid, but it was fairly pleasant overall.  The general consensus on wines made from Friulano grapes is that they're nice enough but rarely have the depth or complexity of wines made from Sauvignon Blanc and I'd have to say that my experience matches up with that pretty well.  I doubt very seriously that I'll go very far out of my way in the future to drink Friulano based wines, but I certainly won't actively avoid them either.