Happy news for fellow fans of Chaddsford

For anyone here who likes the wines of Pennsylvania's Chaddsford Winery, this page shows that the estate has won five of ten top honours at the Pennsylvania Wine Society’s fifth annual Pennsylvania Excellence Awards.

I had the pleasure some time back of trying Chaddsford's Chambourcin (my notes can be found on the old WLDG forum.)

By the way - have any of our Eastern friends heard from Mark Cochard lately?

Paul,

I first met Eric Miller out in Oregon at the second International Pinot Noir Celebration in 1989. He had a Pinot he had made from Eastern fruit that raised many eyebrows out there. We hit it off, and he tasted my 87 Pinot from Michigan and we were instant vino-buddies. I think his Chambourcin is the best hybrid wine I have ever tasted bar none. And I don't like hybrids! Glad to hear he is doing so well. It has been many years since I last saw Eric and Lee. We bumped into each other at a tasting at the top of the World Trade Center in 1991 and spent the next several days together in Little Italy and then on the Jersey coast. They are great people and deserve great success. Nice to see they have a fan club!

Jim Lester
Wyncroft, LLC

Thanks James. I think that here in Ontario, where we have a relatively small but thriving wine region, Pinot Noir and Cab Franc are the two red viniferas that I think have done well of the ones that have been most focused on. Cab Sauvignon, to my taste, is annoyingly green almost every vintage, unless it's a whopper vintage like 1998 or maybe 2005. Some other red viniferas such as the Central European Zweigelt and Blaufränkisch would do well in our area also, but they carry far less name cachet than the popular French grapes and so their acreage (and the publicity behind them) is limited.

Having said that, hybrids are one of my favourite categories of all because I believe that when a vine is climatically suited to one's terroir, it will establish itself better and grow more reliably given the climate. Here in Ontario we are lucky that a few visionaries saw beyond the old way of thinking about hybrids and began in the mid-to-late '90s to craft huge, inky reds, barrel ageing them and turning out wines of great power, colour and flavour interest, if not finesse. But as I like to say, there's more to life than finesse - and if we can make wines of forceful personality from hybrids that bespeak the wild pedigrees of the vines, then more power to such wineries.

As far as the Chaddsford Chambourcin goes, it's better than any Chambourcin I've tasted from Ontario, and we don't have many here - mostly we have Foch and Baco Noir (Foch is my favourite of the two). I feel that our growing season is a tad too short to do Chambourcin really well. Once you get into Pennsylvania and Indiana, that's where Chambourcin seems to really shine.

Paul,

I have had the privilege of touring Niargara on the Lake twice and want to come back again soon. It is a wonderful area and we tasted many good wines and a few stunners. My favorites there were the dry Rieslings, though we had some lovely Chardonnays and Pinots.

Chambourcin is a late ripening variety and matures at the same time as Cabernet Sauvignon, so I agree that it may be not suitable. It is my favorite hybrid making a wine that tastes somewhere between a Cote du Rhone and a Pinot Noir. I agree on Foch too. It just tastes better than Baco, I think. The problem for wineries making hybrids is a commercial one. Even a mediocre green Cabernet Sauvignon selling for $25.00 will outsell a very good Foch at half that price. I'm not at all certain that the public will ever accept hybrid wines like they will vinifera wines.

Jim Lester

The problem for wineries making hybrids is a commercial one. Even a mediocre green Cabernet Sauvignon selling for $25.00 will outsell a very good Foch at half that price. I'm not at all certain that the public will ever accept hybrid wines like they will vinifera wines.

Well said, and I've often seen the same thing happening in Ontario, where Cabernet is really pushed and every winery seems to make one ... Trouble is, most of them taste terribly green and those that don't usually fetch very high prices.

The problem hybrids face, in my view, is that even though excellent table wines are being made from them, they just don't receive the kind of spotlight that the famous French grapes do, and getting people to overcome the inertia of just going for that which has been popularized and become familiar will indeed be a long-term challenge.

Thankfully, much good work is being done in the area of breeding high-quality cultivars for Midwestern conditions and I do feel that local support for the wines - so long as talented winemakers do great things with them - will grow.

Paul,
Asimov praises Chaddsford's '05 pinot noir in todays' NYT as an example of the distinctiveness of wines from different regions of North America.

Dan

Dan, thanks for that bit of information.

It's always been my hope that with the advances in quality that rode in on the vinifera wave in our region, those same quality-minded approaches would rub off on non-vinifera winemaking to ensure that the majority of hybrid and native wines are equally well made. I think we're moving in the right direction, albeit slowly, on all fronts.