Zaca Mesa & Carpenter Creek Red Blends with BBQ Ribs
Hosting Linda’s friends at The Cove, our vacation rental home in Destin, FL, Linda prepared BBQ Ribs with baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, asparagus and salad.
I brought from our home cellar a couple wines for a food wine accompaniment for the occasion.
Playing on Kay Z’s name, we brought and drank a ‘Z’ wine, a Syrah from Zaca Mesa.
Zaca Mesa Toyon Santa Ynez Valley Red Wine 2019
We tasted this wine at the winery and acquired it through our wine club allocation and wrote about receiving the shipment in an earlier blogpost - Zaca Mesa Mesa Reserve Santa Ynez Syrah.
We just received our wine club allocation fall shipment from Zaca Mesa Winery. We visited the Zaca Mesa Estate and Vineyards in Santa Ynez Valley during our Santa Barbara County Wine Experience last spring. We joined their wine club after tasting their portfolio of Rhone varietal based wines highlighting Syrah, one of our favorite varietals.This was one of the last bottles from that shipment, a mixed case of Zaca Mesa wines, that we had been holding to share and enjoy with our friend Kay Z. We wrote about this label in an earlier blogpost, excerpted here.
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| Brambly bushes and shrubs around Foxen Trail Vineyards |
Zaca Mesa Toyon is a unique blend comprised of a combination of Santa Ynez Valley Rhône and Bordeaux grape varietals, sourced from fruit grown on and off the estate.
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| Zaca Mesa Estate Vineyard adjacent the winery |
The primary grape selection is akin to a Châteauneuf-du-Pape from the so named appellation in the southern Rhône River valley where the primary grapes required to be in the blend are G-S-M - Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre.
The GSM combination and so-called label is a popular blend released by many producers in Australia, California and Washington State - areas where Rhône varietals are grown.
But Zaca Mesa take it a step further and adds the popular Bordeaux varietal grape Cabernet Sauvignon to the mix creating a complex wine that is somewhat a cacaphony of flavors, although the producer calls it a "seamless wine that is unlike anything else we produce".
Zaca Mesa Toyon Santa Ynez Valley Red Wine 2019
www.zacamesa.com
@zacamesawinery @zacamesa
https://unwindwine.blogspot.com/2022/11/zaca-mesa-toyon-santa-ynez-valley-red.html
Paying tribute to our shared Hoosier (Indiana) heritage, we also opened and enjoyed a wine from Northern Indiana based Carpenter Creek Cellars.
Various photos here of Carpenter Creek from visits there in December 2019 and again in 2020.
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| Winemaker Randy Rottler (left) and proprietor partner Ed Courtright |
During visits there we tasted and acquired several labels from their broad extensive portfolio - remarkable as they exceeded my expectations for Indiana produced wines. This is a testament to the craft and handiwork of partner proprietors Ed Courtright (right), who wanted to grow grapes in northern Indiana to supply wineries in the area, and winemaker Randy Rottler, who had dreams of starting a small winery.
The farm has been in the Courtright family for three generations. Ed and his son Byron planted their first grape vines in 2002, in what became Byron's vineyard. In 2011, they planted 1.1 acres of Traminette, the Midwestern grape used to produce Indiana's signature wine. After two years of building a business, and one year of restoring a barn/planting vineyards/doing paperwork ... they opened to the public in 2013. Just six months later, they won awards at the 2013 Indy (Indianapolis) International (wine festival) - a Silver Medal in Carpenter Creek labels - Gunny White, Sunset Rosé, and Sunset Red and Bronze Medals for both the Gunny Red and the Riesling.
Carpenter Creek is a farm winery housed in a quaint picturesque renovated 1919 barn. There is the winery and a tasting room of Carpenter Creek Cellars broad portfolio of wines. The estate is actually visible from the interstate highway, I65.
They claim to produce "world-class wines which embody the best terroir and fruit the Midwest has to offer".
While I agree that they 'produce wines that embody the best terroir and fruit the Midwest has to offer', the front of that claim leaves much to be desired. The terroir, climate and soil are not well suited to vinis vinifera (wine grapes). It’s not their fault that Indiana, and most of the Midwest for that matter, is not well suited to growing fine wine varietal grapes. Their challenge is that what makes Indiana a top producer of corn and soybeans, tomatoes and other vegetables and fruits, is precisely why it is not well suited for wine grapes.
As I written often in these pages, the concept of terroir embodies all the elements of a place that affect the growing of varietal grapes - climate, soil, drainage, sun exposure, slope and elevation, proximity to climate impacting bodies of water, and so on. Needless to say, the terroir of Indiana in most respects is not ideal for growing wine grapes. In any event, there are now more than a hundred Indiana wineries that span virtually all regions of the agricultural state from corner to corner.
World class wine growing regions are in certain latitudes in areas with moderate or hot climates, in areas that are arid and possess poor rocky, well drained soils that would otherwise be harsh to the likes of corn or tomatoes. Ideal grape growing conditions - terroir - actually stress the grapes, forcing them to establish deep deep roots to strain in capturing nutrients from the sparse soil, which is largely void of sufficiency to grow extensive vines and foliage, or corn. In short, the conditions for wine varietal grapes are almost the opposite of those for the cornbelt.
While Bordeaux varietals are suited for Napa Valley in the US, not so much in Indiana. One popular grape selected for Indiana and Illinois wines is Traminette. There are eighteen different varieties of grapes grown in Indiana on a total of 600 acres of vineyard lands.
The concept of AVA's, American Viticultural Areas, is based on federally-recognized regions defined either by political boundaries, such as the name of a county, state or country, or by a designated area for that AVA. All the criteria for an AVA come down to terroir so that all wines from that AVA can be presumed to have the same characteristics, or from grapes grown under the same conditions. This is the same as in the old world wine producing countries, where they have rigorous grape growing and wine producing regulations subject to AOC - Appellation d'origine contrôlée regulations in France, and DOC and DOCG in Italy ((Denominazione di origine controllata e garantita (DOCG) is the superior classification to DOC).
While there are 57 official appellations in Bordeaux, and seventeen in Napa Valley. Indiana has two designated AVAs, the Indiana Uplands AVA in the center of the state at the southern border along the Ohio River, and the Ohio River Valley AVA straddling the Ohio River along the southern border of the state.
In order for a wine to be designated with an Appellation of Origin defined by a political boundary, such as a county name for example, federal law requires that 75 percent or more of grapes used to make the wine be from that appellation, such as Napa Valley.
Carpenter Creek Cellars source many of their grapes from California regions - central coast, Sierra foothills, central valley. They also source grapes grown in the Midwest, those tend to be from the southern reaches of Indiana in the two AVAs bordering the Ohio River, or from the wine growing areas of western Michigan, straddling Lake Michigan or Ohio, along Lake Erie, where the Lakes' have significant moderating effects on the local climate.
They produce an extensive portfolio of wines that cover the range from reds and whites, along with a port-like fortified wine, a dessert wine, and a Rose'.
https://carpentercreekcellars.com/
https://twitter.com/carpenterwines
http://IndianaWines.org
