Saturday night, we opened a bottle of Parallel 44 Petite Pearl, from the Greater Green Bay Area appellation. My wife had picked this up during a trip to Wisconsin a year or so ago. Petite Pearl is a hybrid that was developed for cold climates by a guy named Tom Plocher. The folks at Parallel 44 tasted some (non-commercial) wine made from this grape and were excited enough by it to plant a bunch of it in their vineyard outside of Green Bay. This bottle came from the first commercial bottling of the variety and is hand marked as #57 of 307. There's no vintage on the bottle but I believe it must have been from 2012 (it's from the inaugural vintage which was released in 2013). The wine is listed at 11.7% abv.
I popped the cork a bit before supper to give it a try. Dark garnet color, fairly impressive nose of black fruit with a touch of violet in it. In the mouth, it's all blackberry fruit with no trace of labrusca character to it. There's pretty decent acidity present to balance out the fruit and very soft tannins as well. The flavor stays full through the mid-palate and the wine finishes clean with a bit of lingering acidity. Whatever oak treatment this received was not at all overbearing. It didn't seem to change much over supper and a taste of the wine tje next day (after leaving it with the cork in on the sideboard) showed that little changed overnight, although there might be a trace of some oxidation evident.
If this bottle is characteristic of what can be done with this grape, then we may end up seeing a lot more of it from the upper Midwest. Supposedly, the vines can handle temperatures down to -32 °F, so it would be a match for the frozen tundra. Should be interesting to see how future vintages of this wine turn out.