Michigan Sparkling Wine
Photo by Melissa Schneider.
Melissa and I tried Sex for the first time on Valentine's Day. No need to cover your eyes: Sex is the attention-grabbing name of a bubble-gum-pink sparkler from Michigan's L. Mawby winery. The wine gushes strawberry and raspberry aromas like a Jolly Rancher candy. The palate-cleansing acidity and light body make it a perfect aperitif, and the name will certainly help break the ice at a party: "Would you like some Sex?" It was a bit overwhelmed by the duck confit I made for dinner, but would pair nicely with light appetizers.
Oddly, this is the second Michigan sparkler I've tried in the last few months. A reader sent me a bottle of Fizz, a non-rosé from the same producer. Fizz offers tart Granny Smith apple flavors in place of Sex's berries, and we served this off-dry wine with Christmas breakfast. (Michigan's wine shipping laws make this present barely legal at best, so I won't name names).
Michigan Primer
These days it's easy to learn about those wine laws, but almost impossible to learn about the wines. Don't bother with the standard references, which skip from Illinois to Missouri—just visit the Michigan Grape and Wine Industry Council to get the basics.
The most basic of basics is the weather. The bitter cold of the northern winters constrains the state's wine region. The best vineyards huddle around Lake Michigan, which stabilizes the local temperature: Blanketing snow replaces killing frost, buds hide inside the growth tissue of the plant until winter's worst passes by, and the growing season lengthens by four precious weeks.
My tiny pool of Michigan wine knowledge has held onto the factoid that the state has earned praise for its sparklers. Bubbly wines require grapes with low sugar and high acidity, an obvious fit for a region where "warm" is a relative term.
L. Mawby
L. Mawby has hitched itself to the sparkling star. For the M. Lawrence label that includes Sex and Fizz, wine maker Lawrence Mawby uses a stainless steel tank to contain the secondary fermentation that creates the bubbles. The technique, called cuvé close or Charmat, tends to produce wines exactly like the ones I tried: friendly, vibrant, and appealing. Under his original L. Mawby label, he produces creamier, more complex sparkling wines through the laborious méthode traditionelle used in Champagne. Let me know if you've found those. The winery only produces 4,000 cases of wine, well below what you need for good national distribution produces 40,000 cases of wine a year, but not much seems to get to California, so I'm lucky I found Sex at Paul Marcus Wines.
And the name? Aside from its obvious eye-catching quality, I suspect it's a pun on sekt, the German term for sparkling wine.
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