2021 Rhapsody in Red

Red Blend

IN - Indiana

$20.00 / 750 mL Bottle

Alcohol 13.4%

This wine is the epitome of what I call "Fun Winemaking". This is field blending, and field blending is a very old concept from France. If you were to travel to old vineyards of France, especially southern and western France, you would see plots of a half acre, one acre, five acre, etc of different varieties growing side by side. So why do it? Partly, well mainly because it allows the fruit to come in every year. When diseases weren't fully understood, this methodology allowed the vineyards to hedge their bets to allow for a crop to come in every year, regardless. Other benefits they discovered included added complexity to the wines they made (like adding a whole lot of spices to a soup, for instance), and unique product offerings in the marketplace -- no one else was growing that combination or that ratio of that combination. The scary part about making wine like this is you literally don't know what you're going to get from year to year. Each grape variety ripens and flavors differently due to yearly climate changes. We always have wine to back blend in just in case we go, hmmm....that needs a fix, but by and large we try not to do that. This wine is a blend of our Frontenac and Chambourcin. Tank fermented on the skins for 6 weeks. This is the pressed wine too, not the free run wine. Think dark cassis fruit and cranberries galore and you have this wine figured out.

Notes

One of my favorite wines to just pop open a bottle and sit on the deck and enjoy with a chunk of cheese.

Maker Name

Jim Pfeiffer

Vineyard/Orchard Name

Turtle Run Vineyards