© Paul Bulas
My love of native North American labrusca grapes took root long
before I became interested in wine. Childhood memories of times
spent playing under a friend's trellised grapevines where the
heady, almost "winey" aroma of ripening Concord and
Niagara grapes would waft about in the late September breeze and
accentuate the arrival of Autumn, have always made for pleasant
reminiscing.
When I started learning about wine, I would occasionally think
back to the grapes of my childhood and wonder why there were so
few commercial table wines made from them. Sure, these grapes
were used for wines -- but the scant few examples were usually
sacramental wines, and even these wines were usually spoken of as
being unpleasant. While I never found the aromatics of these
wines disagreeable, I did find them too sweet for my taste.
Once I thought about the first time that I had tried an Alsatian
Gewürztraminer. I could remember the interplay between the rich
lychee-and-spice aromatics of the wine and its highly taut, acid-driven
and acid-defined structure. Powerfully forward on the nose, yet
firmly elegant and refined on the palate -- this became, in many
ways, my ideal style of wine. Aromatic grapes like Gewürztraminer
or the Hungarian Irsai Olivér when vinified dry, yielded a
lively style that I came to really enjoy.
Then the thought came to me: What sort of wines could result if
highly aromatic labrusca grapes were vinified dry in a style
similar to that of the aromatic vinifera grapes? Due to the lack
of dry labrusca on the market, the answer to this was not
immediately clear. But it was a question yearning for an answer.
Given that labrusca is generally grown in short-season (and often
cool-climate) viticultural regions, it can be inferred that wines
made from it should be able to display a taut, acid-driven
backbone if vinified dry. And with the grapes being strongly
aromatic, it follows that the well-structured wines would be
aromatic -- even monochromatically so. A highly aromatic,
structured, texturally elegant labrusca wine therefore seems to
be within the realm of possibility, at least as a concept.
Admittedly, labrusca grapes aren't going to produce wines
according to the European model of aromatic elegance and finesse.
They're simply too brash for that, and there's the question of
whether one actually enjoys the wines' so-called "foxy"
flavours. But can these grapes produce idiosyncratic wines that
are expressive of their North American origins in a texturally
elegant vein? Intuition so far tells me that the answer to this
should be a definite yes.
October 2001