WBW 7: Unusual Reds
When Andrew suggested "Unusual Red Varieties" as his Wine Blogging Wednesday theme, my pedantic streak kicked in about what he considered unusual. As I said in one comment, one person's unusual is another person's trite, something he hints at in the announcement by forbidding Pinotage to South Africans but not to Americans who have a hard time finding it. French Colombard bound for box wines, while not a red grape, accounts for more California wine acreage than anything except Chardonnay. Could we consider it an unknown despite this? I'll be curious to read the other entries when Andrew posts the wrap-up in the next couple of days.
I consider the Cynthiana, better known as the Norton, unusual, but readers in the Midwestern United States might disagree. At any rate, it wasn't on Andrew's verboten list. Norton is an oddball among native American vines. While most are of the species Vitis labrusca, Norton is a member of V. aestivalis. It's still not V. vinifera, the species that contains the world's great wine grapes, but Gerald Asher thinks the Norton has the potential to produce fine wines, and he points out that it's well suited to the cold winters and rot-prone vineyards of Missouri's foggy wine country.
A century ago, wine experts around the world assumed that the Great American Wine would be Norton from Missouri. But something happened on the way to the 1920's: The Temperance movement decided to go after the state's wine industry, the largest in the country. World War I offered a serendipitous opening. Many emigrants from Germany settled in the Midwest, and a simple slogan of "a dry vote is a vote against the Kaiser" linked WWI's Big Bad with people who had emigrated decades before. That campaign helped decimate an industry already struggling with high costs and it paved the way for Prohibition, a nationwide ban on alcohol. Missouri never really recovered even after the government repealed Prohibition. California became a behemoth with its imported grapes, and Norton doesn't invite quick replantings. You can't grow it from clippings as you can with vinifera vines; you have to push a shoot from an active vine down into the ground and wait for it to start its own root system before you separate the plants like a surgeon dealing with conjoined twins.
In 1965, Jim and Betty Ann Held decided to start producing wine again at Stone Hill—once the country's second-largest winery—near the town of Hellmann. Their modest success encouraged other wineries to make a go of it. One was Augusta Winery, which started in 1988 about 40-50 miles east of Hermann in the town of Augusta. They grow most of their own grapes, but they do buy some as well. In 2001, the winery started bottling Cynthiana as Norton with a "Cynthiana" subtitle, but my bottle predates that by a year. They're clearly proud of the wine's Missouri heritage, even proclaiming that the wine was aged in Missouri oak.
The bottle was left over from a wine competition, which is why it has the funny tag near the neck. It garnered a silver medal at the 2003 San Francisco International Wine Competition plus other awards around the country. I consider medals to be a bunch of bunk. You'll have to hunt down a bottle to see for yourself what you think, but until then you can read my thoughts.
2000 Augusta Winery Cynthiana, Missouri, price N/ATasting Note: This wine is a lovely pomegranate-seed red with thin salmon edges. There's an awkward alcohol component to the nose, but the dominant aromas are raspberry and smoke. A deeper sniff might reveal a meaty quality and a hint of bubble gum. The wine features soft tannins and a modest acidity, with flavors that briefly suggest dusty vanilla and raspberries before being swept away by the taste of cooked beef which is in turn masked by a long finish of hickory smoke.
Food: We drank this wine with macaroni and cheese. No, it was not home made, but nor was it from Kraft. It was a weeknight. Enough said on that subject. I'd actually like to try this wine with a roast chicken simply seasoned with lemon and good salt.
General Thoughts: Melissa liked this wine, but I found that the flavors were not in harmony with each other. It's as if there were two flavor axes running parallel to each other rather than being entwined. That may not make sense, but it's the way I thought of it. Though the Norton can handle some age, it's possible this wine is in an awkward phase; it didn't seem over the hill, as the fruit was still strong, but nor did it suggest a complexity that would mature into something interesting. The oak dominated more than I like, but obviously different people like different amounts.
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