MID.LIFE.CRISIS

Free. We journey south, purging our palates of Stoutridge with water, on route to Benmarl Winery. A sign guides us past suburbia and onto a gravel road. Knotted, older vines twist along a slope to the left. Unassuming barn buildings emerge and we park the car just below them. In the courtyard, a white tour van worries us of the possible wine-trail trash inside. But the worn wood, flower beds, the faded door handle all reassures that this is more about wine than image.
Luck. The walking veil with mini plastic penises and her bridesmaids are already stumbling out of the cellar. We slide past their chatter to stand at the tasting table. No one. Just the smell of burnt cheese whiz. Not an ideal wine pairing. Our man pokes his head out of the kitchen, apologizes incoherently and disappears again. We glance at used wine lists.

Benmarl gleams its glory from having "America's oldest continuously producing vineyard" with 18th century grapes, Farm Winery License #1 and its "slate hill" name derived from Gaelic. We certainly stood in what was once a diner and everywhere was unfinished flooring and wood work. Our guide, still chewing, retired but amiable finally came up and began our tasting.

2008 Dry Riesling: Once my nose cut through our friend's cheese aura, vanilla notes from oak and butter jumped out of the glass. On a riesling? Seriously? Nearly all New York, German and Austrian riesling, I thought, rarely saw secondary fermentations especially not in new oak barrels. Yet there it was. A medium weight riesling, still holding its golden apple and pear notes yet cushioned in pillows of American oak and popcorn's diacetyl. Not bad actually. Perplexed, we moved on.

2008 Traminette: flowers and ginger danced quietly, echoing the hybrid grape's gewurztraminer origins. A crisp attack of acidity and green citrus followed on the palate. No oak just stainless steel and a trust that cool climate's grapes deserved their acidity. These vines are still young.

2008 Estate Baco Noir: Finally a legitimately local wine, born and raised to bottle on site from 50 year old vines. Baco noir began as a crossing a century ago by Francois Baco working in Belus, France. He created a red more resilient to rot, mildew, phyloxera, and cold from an unknown American and the grape hiding behind Cognac and Armagnac fame: folle blanche. Benmarl keeps it honest here. Black cherry, boysenberry, herbs and light oak spices are quickened by moderate acidity and a drawn out finish. Great wine but not at thirty dollars.

2008 Cabernet Franc: Yay! wait...it is re-fermenting in the bottle. Not today.

2008 Merlot: Oaked. Plum. Dull. Long Island grapes.

DeChaunac: Decent and red and twelve bucks.

2007 Cabernet Sauvignon: An import from Californian vines. It is well produced but underwhelming and, sadly, a sign of things to come throughout the Hudson.

Sangria: Our guide admits they dump a bucket called "Sangria" into their left over red.

Benmarl's wines show some experimentation under their new owner, Victor Spaccarelli. They are well made and interesting when local. Yet like the tasting room (a diner addition still under renovation), the fizzy cab franc and sangria, Benmarl lacks focus.
We wandered around the cellar basement, which retained the dust, barrels and bottles of Benmarl's original ownership. The remnant pride in its Baco noir echoed throughout the collection. Mark Miller obviously cared about his Baco and Spaccarelli has carried that mantel well enough since 2006.
Once outside, we saw how perfect this slate hill was for wine. High over the Hudson, the slope had great exposure to the morning sun: perfect for ripening grapes in cool climates. But like the fifty year old Baco noir, the 60s Corvette in the courtyard and all the rennovations, Benmarl was going through a midlife crisis. I still have hopes for how it will look tomorrow.

PREMATURE.AGGRANDIZATION

Our wine tour of the Hudson "gunks" off first with Stoutridge Winery. The winery sits at the end of a pit. On the right, a drainage pipe pours into what aspires to be a pond. Small plots of vines run up the hill like thinning hairs. The drive ends at the winery: an imposing cream cube littered with french lanterns, potted plants and hand-written signs that misdirect the entry.The side door opens to a long tasting bar connected to the cash registers. Behind the bar bounds Stephen Osborn with his bottle brandished high in hand. We catch him in mid-attack, breathless and raving, something about all other wines being canned tomato juice, processed, homogenized, pasteurized blandness.

The crowd stands a good yard away from the bar. They near this proselytizer in polyester only to fill the next glass and then step back. We squeeze up and Osborn throws two glasses down without breaking his verbal stride.

He starts with white. A pretty standard Vidal Blanc, like many from the Finger Lakes, with light white pear, honey and enough acidity to keep it from being boring. Next, two white blends showing off 2006's cool climate acidity against 2007's sunnier climes but softer and flabbier results. Next, the reds cut the palate with unending acidity and tight tannins. Osborn proudly kept waving his decanters up to a hanging light. They were ink black and not just hazy but opaque. The texture resembled pureed tomato sauce. Briars, black pepper, grass, pencil lead, stones overwhelmed any fruit quality. Drinkable whites and really rough reds, but what matters is the spin.

Osborn pushes that this is how wine is meant to taste. He adds nothing unnatural and says all his wines are unfined, unpumped and unfiltered. In itself this is laudable but slightly misleading, because he never educates us about what he actually does. Words like eco-friendly, solar power, green, all natural, antioxidants and slow food keep filling his sentences and the room, assuming these terms are self-satisfying. Worse, this distracts from real problems with his wine.

He won't ship because his wines cannot survive the heat of trucks (all of which are refrigerated). The wine is naturally fizzy because that is...um nature (a little stirring would resolve that problem). The crystals at the bottle bottom are normal (potassium tartrate crystals actually develop when wine is over-refrigerated). The wine is hazy because it contains healthy pectins and proteins, which he does not filter or fine away (a little more racking, even with your gravity-only setup, would solve that). High acidity and rough tannins are good for you, just decant for two hours or more (what? my wife's already gone to bed.).

Osborn never asks for reactions or questions about his wine. He must know it all.
Now hammered, but not because of alcohol, we break off to check out the winery. Shrink-wrapped barrels and stainless steel vats were cloistered behind glass. A computer monitor on a dresser enlightened us with bright colors about tank temperatures. Whether they were real or not. The kicker was the "Museum".
In an act of premature aggrandization, the Museum displays man-sized barrels mounted with LCD screens, knobs and Stoutridge's tomato sauce logo. The small plaque on the 1990s tropical carpeting reminds us that this hallowed space is cold because it is in a hill and therefore environmentally friendly. Impressive? Sure. But this all reeks of Disneyland (surprise, Osborn comes from California). Standing there, I cannot imagine these gleaming barrels in use. Everything is too clean and polished. That heady aroma of wine at work is no where.
Branding wine matters. The labels on your bottles should convey to the customer something about what is inside. That something can be the taste, place, persons or purpose behind the wine. If Osborn claims that "this is what wine should taste like", then why does his logo and labels resemble airbrushed playdough? If his message is all-natural wine, shouldn't his label be something other than a cartoon blob? Or maybe that is it. Like the blob, Stoutridge is not open to comment or question. You cannot fight it's mixed message of environmentalism and modernism. Nor do you want to drink it.

DEGUNKING.SHAWANGUNK

"Get Gunked" is screen-printed on the Organic Baby Bodysuit ($24.99), the "Classic" Thong ($10.39) and everything from Mugs to the Dog T-Shirt ($22.99). Luckily, nothing actually related to wine bears the Shawangunk Wine Trail's attempt at shoot its fleeting reputation in the foot. Would you even know how to gunk yourself if your glass had that printed on it?

Wine tasting should be fun, but advertising that your region's merits boil down to not just getting drunk, but something more akin to getting junked, funked, or worse, punk'd relegates your wine to shower grime or is-your-refrigerator-running prank calls.

New York wine has struggled for decades to gain a laudable international reputation, yet it still serves wine as if it were cheap beer or vodka shots. Tourists will go wine tasting anyway. Why not treat them like adults? Teach them to enjoy exploring wine for more than its alcoholic effects. Drinking can tell them so much about a place, from a year's weather and geography, to the people and their traditions.

Beneath the Get Gunked website campaign are paragraphs promising that "The eleven wineries on the Trail all follow the tradition of the fine winemaking established by the early French Huguenot settlers who brought their wine making expertise to this valley over 300 years ago." Sound legitimate-ish right? With descriptors like "well crafted", "beautifully made", "majestic Hudson River", "memorable experience", "prize winning" and only a two hour drive, I thought, why not drag the wife down?

With the Hudson Valley's identity crisis in mind, let's go wine tasting!

MYTHMENDING.ENDING

The final battle nears. Since late January, I have coerced grape juice into wine. Yet if I don't begin bottling, it all risks ruin. Pumping oxygen out has carried my wine through weeks of racking. Now I must use the remaining two cleanser packs to purge thirty three bottles of their pasts.
Drinking through the weeks left me with a few bottles. Work provided the rest. I rinsed and scrubbed each. Then my Trojan horse of Sodium Sulfate trumped any resisting bacteria. I re-rinsed everything three more times until the burning subsided. Tired and impatient, I brought in the fan.
Once somewhat dry, my siege-work of bottles were set for the final assault. I attached the bottling "Easy"-Siphon to the racking set, propped the carboy on a chair one last time, and, with help, began filling the bottles...
Messy. The siphon did not work with bottles that had curved punts (bases). Filling the other bottles went too quickly, so I had to manually top up to the necks (otherwise there would be excess air contact with the wine). My hands were bloodied and/or pink, the bathtub battlefield was stained by fallen victims, and tears strewn across my cheeks from the sodium sulfate.
Although only twenty-six bottles could fill, victory lay at hand, so I readied the corker.
Since I had sixty fresh corks from the separate juice and equipment kits, I used both in case one set was defective, thus hoping to save half of my surviving wine...unless both set failed...
Before the cork squeezed into the neck (more or less), I pushed the last oxygen out with the Nitrogen blend. In antiquity, everything from olive oil to still fermenting CO2 kept their wine from spoiling. Today, most bottling is mechanized in temperature controlled environments, and bottles are wholly absent of oxygen. Me...well I might have cleaned the bathroom earlier.
With cruel irony, I put my pseudo-barbaresco into real bottles of Barbaresco (still no reply from the company as to the grape type[s], provenance, or vintage of the grape must). Like Patroclus in Achilles' armor, my wine and I aimed at undue glories.
Rarely did the corks fit the differing bottles sizes (although screw-capped bottles seemed the most forgiving). The last task remained: foil capping. While wine is in storage, vermin love to nibble corks, so wax caps and later foil kept them at bay. Given my poor corking, an extra seal to keep wine off the carpet would not hurt...

Even if it could not hide the corks sticking out of the neck.

Now the bottles needed two days to stand and allow the corks to fully expand. I then took my completed twenty six and laid them rest, so that their corks might remain moist and the wine age.

A few nights later I uncorked a bottle at a friend's pasta party. The wine's levity and fruit went quickly and well, showing none of the blood, tears or kitty litter that went into it.

Thus, then, did they celebrate the wine of mine, tamer of Barbaresco.

ROTA.FORTUNAE

Like fate's turning wheel, my burgeoning Barbaresco cycles to and fro between the glass carboy and fermenting tank, uncertain of its future. For the last week, the Chitosan bonded with the Kieselsol pulling the proteins, dead yeasts and excess junk to the carboy's bottom. Inches of debris now colored the base purple. So I racked the wine, hoping to not need filter pads.
Many winemakers take pride in avoiding filtration. They believe that it thins wine and removes complex flavors that could develop if left to age in bottle. That, and my wine already seemed thinner than any Barbarescos that had ever passed my palate.Racking the wine too many times, however, does risk ruining the end product. If you splash it too much or let oxygen froth into the tube, you get vinegar. So I did my best to be gentle. The grime left at the bottom = success.
The next day, I racked it again.
Although Barbaresco has pedigree, it bears little relation to the wines it claims from antiquity. Not only has the process modernized into a chemist's wet dream, the end products could not be further apart. The wine of antiquity saw massive extraction and addition of spices, honey, fruit and other inebriates like opium. Much was boiled down in lead tanks to increase the sweetness and weight. This sugary, alcoholic monster (akin to Madeira, PX Sherry or Port), was often diluted with water (unless you were a barbarian).No more digressing. Me knocking Barbaresco or antiquity won't make my Canadian Welches taste any better. All I know is that this racking makes me sleepy. Kneeling nearly prostrate before my bucket-o-wine altar I realized, at the heart of crafting wine lies patience, attention and mostly luck.Luckily, the only slough left this time fit into one glass.
I had to taste it. What if the nightly gassing with CO2, Argon and Nitrogen didn't keep oxidation away? What if all the shellfish glue, preservatives, dead yeasts and kitty litter killed the fruity, grape-y decentness that came maybe from Italy, maybe Canada? What if the apartment was too cold or too hot? The bouquet told me that I hadn't screwed up. No mustiness or yeast, just red fruit and floral notes. The appearance lacked haze. Going down everything seemed fine, if a bit bland. Light notes of dried red cherry, cranberry and pepper dust came and went. Alcohol and acidity presented themselves but only to flank the slim-bodied fruit.

Who knows? Maybe re-racking and bottling won't kill it.

TABULA.RASA

Now the step of clearing the wine lay before me. Last week had let the remnant CO2 bubble away. Windows had been cracked and the sun blocked, freezing my wife, but keeping the wine from jumping into a bacterial outbreak of disaster movie proportions.
Inches of grape must and dead yeast now lay at the bottom of the carboy. Tasty. They needed a proper burial, so I re-racked the wine, halting just before I sucked up the purple elmer's glue (melted mcdonald's grimace?) at the bottom.
Annoyingly, yeast corpses and bubbles still persisted. Another racking and stirring was in order. So I reenacted the bathroom scene in Pyscho...
cleansed everything with sulfur, let dry and double checked the specific gravity: 0.997ish...good enough.Once clean and dry, I return the wine to the carboy and begin the stirring. My instructions warn this could take "1 hour to 3 days depending on how much CO2 is present". Seriously?Luckily the bubbles whisk away after a few hours of intermittent stirring. I immediately switch to my chemical packets before too much oxygen sours the wine.
First up, Sodium Metabisulphite: the gods' gift to food preservation (n.b. if you get headaches from wine, don't blame a sulphite allergy, which is as rare as a peanut allergy (a serving of broccoli has more sulphites than a bottle wine anyway). Instead, you either react to the dehydrating effects of alcohol and tannin or the antihistamine inducing cogeners. So eat something, drink less or slower for crying out loud).

With my wine preserved for all time, I switched gears to the fining process. Within mystery packet #5 (what happened to #3 and #4 by the by?) was Kieselsol: a negatively charged silica gel. With the Kieselsol mixed in, I waited a half hour for it to go about negatively charging the yeast cells.
Finally, I squeezed in the Chitosan. This petrollium jelly-like substance comes from crustacean shells (sorry vegetarians). Its positive charge bonds to the negative mess of yeasts and Kieselsol dropping them in clumps to the bottom.

To make sure all this pseudo-chemistry had time to work, I called it a night. A worry lingered however. The instructions advise me to top off the carboy to avoid oxygen turning the wine to vinegar (you might recall that our recently-departed yeasts made CO2, which had kept oxidation at bay). However, watering down the wine or adding another wine sounded like horrible ideas.

"EUREKA"! Instead of squeezing Archimedes down my carboy's two-inch neck, I went in search of glass marbles to increase my wine's volume! Hah! Classics does pay! An hour and a few pet and craft stores later, I returned home empty-handed.

Then I realized: "replace the CO2 with...well...CO2"! I took my handy Private Preserve gas-in-a-can (that I used to keep half-drunken bottles fresh) and gassed my carboy and capped the top with the airlock. The next morning, the ladybug of prophecy signaled my success.

SPLASH SPLASH DEGASS

In the evening, after the yeasts had quieted, I set about setting about my secondary fermentation. I emerged from the sulfuric hot spring (i.e.: cleaning my equipment in the bathroom). Once the reek of rotten eggs lifted and my various tubes dried, I arranged the plastic rubber octopus into action.
My yeasts had done a brilliant job but they needed one last chance to ferment off any remaining sugars. So after a few forced pumps of the tubes and my wife's help, the wine frothed into the clear carboy. The book: "Archaeologies of Memory", edited by Ruth M. Van Dyke & Susan E. Alcock, Malden: 2003, once central to my master's thesis, now served as a better leverage to keep the settled sediment at the back of the fermentation tank and out of my tubes.
The yeasts had dissolved quite a bit of CO2 into the wine during fermentation. Near the end of pouring, a pink but very manly foam developed from this remaining gas. Another week would let it breath off.For the sake of science, we tasted the "wine". The yeasts had left the liquid quite hazy. The nose had gained more red current and apple pie qualities with a harsh metallic ring from the CO2. I took a sip, trying to not dwell on the dead, zombie-like yeast carcasses passing my lips.

The palate was gleefully dry and warmingly alcoholic with not a trace of sweetness (I love you goodly, honest hydrometer). A new but balanced acidity and structure of tannins had become apparent as well. The floral, cherry and red berry notes equally persisted from the last tasting: this all seemed like Barbaresco. Annoyingly, however, the finish closed with a light fizzy and bread-like, sourdough quality.

No bottling yet. Patience, patience. Next week would give the CO2 time to evaporate and the suspended yeast cells time to separate from the wine.