I’m a fan of Cab Franc so when I go into my LWS I will usually buy one of each of whatever they have – pretty much no questions asked. I almost always have good luck and the prices are almost always very reasonable. I enjoy them with pizza normally.
I happened to pick up the 2010 Ravines from the Finger Lakes. I was shocked by this wine. Most of the Cab Franc I drink is from the Loire. This wine tasted more like a light California Pinot Noir. Fruity, cherry cola on the nose, lots of red fruit on the palate. No vegetal characteristics, no lead pencil. How could this be the same grape? Really speaks to the whole idea of terroir. Having said all that, the wine was pretty decent, easy drinking and still paired well with my pizza. But not at all what I was expecting.
Speaks to terroir but also to winemaking technique/philosophy, and it points out the problem with marketing by varietal wine.
When I was in retail, I spent countless hours trying to persuade consumers that disliking or liking one particular varietal wine often has nothing to do with the next one that comes along, especially in a wine industry that applies no standards either to place, growing, or production methods.
Yes. On the other hand, 2010 Eminence Road Cabernet Franc Elizabeth’s Vineyard, which is also from the Finger Lakes, could easily be mistaken for Cab Franc from the Loire. So I think it speaks to the winemaking and vineyard management to some extent, although certainly terroir also plays a role.
I think its mostly winemaking. Eminence Road intentionally makes its Cab Franc bretty (which is exquisitely obnoxious, FWIW). Ravines makes clean wine. Ravines tries to make its reds accessible - the Argetsinger is where they get gnarly.
It also could be terroir - the Eminence Road is 100% from the east side of Seneca. I understand that Ravines buys from all over, and its estate fruit was (until recently) mostly Keuka.
“Elizabeth’s Vineyard cabernet franc reliably develops some Brettanomyces just after bottling and the 2011 is no exception; bramble fruit and hints of barnyard in a medium body wine with grippy tannin and a wash of shale.”
I remembered reading that recently when I was planning an office excursion to the Finger Lakes (yes, really, Michael) and was kind of floored. If your cab franc is “reliably” developing brett, clean your [bleep]ing equipment.
Oh, I wasn’t disputing your point. Just wanted to discuss whether you had actually tasted the wine you are ripping on. Your response implies that you have not.
I wasn’t ripping on it. I think its intentionally made in a style to mimic wines from France, which I think is pretty affected - faux rustic hipsterism at its worst. Its highly interventionalist, but I don’t have a problem with that.
I’ve had the Ravines cab franc a couple of times, and it strikes as inoffensive and mediocre. For me, from Ravines there’s the Argetsinger, which is incredible and I buy every year. Then there’s the rest of the stuff, which I could do without.
“At the winery red grapes are hand sorted and crushed by foot into one-ton fermentors without being destemmed. We add a small dose (20 parts per million) of potassium metabisulfite at this point. Our feeling is it leads to healthier malo-lactic fermentation later on down the road but we might abandon this practice in the future. Who knows? After being crushed the must is allowed to ferment naturally with manual punch downs once a day. No yeast, yeast nutrient, enzymes, sugars, acids or additives of any kind beyond the aforementioned sulfite are used. Macerations are short, about nine days for pinot, 14 for the cabernets. Musts are bucketed into a tiny, half ton bladder press for gentle, wet pressing. Settled juice is pumped into old French oak barrels to finish fermentation. We do not rack and top up religiously. After one year, if fermentation has finished, the wine is moved to tank, given another 15 ppm of sulfite and bottled by hand without fining of filtration using a gravity powered 4-spout filler and a hand corker. It takes forever.”
This doesn’t sound “highly interventionalist” to me.
Here is Ravines’ description of how its Cab Franc is made:
“The grapes for this wine were all hand-harvested and de-stemmed into open top fermenters. After starting as a whole berry fermentation, multiple daily punch-downs and pump-overs were conducted. The grapes were given more than three weeks of skin contact prior to pressing. At pressing, skins were hand bucketed out to leave behind most of the seeds and sediment and avoid sources of astringency. Malolactic fermentation took place in barrels for improved texture. The barrels used were 75% French oak and 25% Pennsylvania oak, with 20% new oak overall. Prior to bottling, the wine received a slight egg white fining and filtration.”
That sounds a bit more interventionalist to me. By the way, the Ravines owner/winemaker is French, went to oenology school in France, and worked at Chateau Cos d’Estournel. I’m not sure one can mimic wines from France in general (on account of the broad variety of styles of wine made there), but it sounds like the Ravines winemaker makes wine the way he learned to do in France.
ETA: Not that I have an inherent issue with either approach. I’ve had some very nice Ravines wines. But I happen to think Eminence Road makes some unusually interesting and tasty wines (not to mention that, after having dinner with them within the last year, I think Andrew and Jennifer are lovely people), so I do take some offense at your off-the-cuff judgments about wines you haven’t tasted.
The Ravines winemaker (and owner) is Danish. He did make wine in France and his family owned a vineyard in France. He also made wine in Texas before coming to the Finger Lakes. His first job here was at Konstantin Frank’s Vinifera Wine Cellars.
He has an awareness of wine styles that exceeds France, but he does indeed show a Francophile sensibility.
Okay, he may be of Danish ancestry, but he was raised in Provence, in the south of France. And he went to oenology school in France, and got his start making wine in France. None of this is a criticism. The vast majority of the wine I collect is French. I am simply responding to David’s earlier point.
IMO, intentionally letting a brett infection happen is highly interventionalist winemaking. You’re using interventionalist as short-hand for “making wines in a way that I am ideologically opposed to”. That’s not what it really means, but your usage is sadly typical these days, if wholly misguided.
Interventionalist does not equal “technology”. And relatedly, technology (and clean winemaking practices) is not “bad”. It’s actually really hard to define “interventionalist” - your “intervention” is my “competent wine making” - but insofar as a definition exists, I think it must be “intentionally manipulating flavor”. Letting brett happen doesn’t make a wine more transparent, or enhance varietal character - it’s just artifice to replicate what happened naturally when a small farmer was making wines in rural France.
People that prefer wines that are made with greater intervention always have a problem with defining “interventionalist” because they have a hard time admitting that they prefer wines made in a more interventionalist way. It’s simple. When you do more shit to the wine, that is more “interventionalist” than doing less shit to the wine. More punchdowns, pumpovers, etc. to get greater extraction is interventionalist. Adding things to the wine - like enzymes, cultured yeast, mega purple, etc. - is interventionalist. Fining and filtering the near-finished product is interventionalist. There are other examples. Some of these things may result in wines you like more. In fact, some of them may even result in wines that I like more. But they are interventions, and doing them makes you more “interventionalist” than someone that does not do them. Don’t confuse difficulty of definition with opinions about whether intervention is good.
This is nonsense. Wine does not happen naturally. Grape monoculture does not happen naturally, and vinifera sure as hell doesn’t naturally grow in the Northeastern US. Nothing about the process is natural; everything is human artifice. Grafting / clone propogation is artifiical. So is pruning, training, canopy management. Low yields are artificial. All wine is 100% screwed around with, even before the grapes are picked. Frankly, megapurple is the least of your concerns. Fining is not OK, but using gravity and time to settle out suspended material is?
There’s no reason to define intervention the way you want to define it - more “natural” than other methods. It’s meaningless because wine is unnatural. On the other hand, making wine as a pastiche to duplicate a style that arose organically in another place, maybe interventionalist isn’t the right word, but it is certainly “affected” or “precious”. IMO, the goal of a winemaker should be to make wine that (1) tastes good and (2) is distinctive / unique. Making fake Loire cab franc with a brett infection isn’t either of those, but its very shrewd marketing, as your enthusiasm evidences.
Gravity and time are the absolute worst examples you could possibly have chosen. Nothing is more natural. Of course wine does not happen naturally. Intervention is a spectrum. Some human intervention is necessary to make wine. Some further human intervention may be necessary to make sound wine. And then beyond that there are many different styles of sound wine, some of which are more interventionalist and some of which are less interventionalist. The fact that some human intervention is necessary to make wine does not preclude defining interventionalist as doing more to the wine rather than less.
I don’t think an artificial product can be made more or less artificial. You’re just deeming some artificial interventions acceptable and others unacceptable. It’s an ex post way to justify your arbitrary wine-values, and fundamentally meaningless. But, I think both of us have made our positions clear.
Tim:
If you like cab franc you need to seek out one from the Niagara region on either side of the border. When reds started appearing in the region, I thought Pinot noir was going to be the star but time has proven that cab franc is the red that puts them on the map.
I drove through the area about 5 years ago and tasted at a couple of places – wasn’t really a fan of anything as I recall. I almost never see Canadian wines for sale, not that I’m really ever looking. I’m itching to do another epic road trip where I hit Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto in the next few years. Will certainly do more research then.