Via Gael at Pop Culture Junk Mail comes this link to a piece in Time Magazine by Joel Stein wherein he, his wife, and popular wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk sampled and critiqued 50 wines, one from each state in the U.S.
It’s interesting to discover that there is apparently at least one winery in every state of the Union. Many of them do not have their own vineyards, they buy the grapes and then make their own blends of juices to produce whatever varieties of wine they hope to sell. Quite a few make wine from fruits other than grapes, and in those cases they do indeed often grow their own fruit. Most of the wineries only sell their products locally. Stein doesn’t say how they managed to choose the wines they sampled, or why one winery might have been chosen over another, so the rankings that he ends up with need to be viewed as only being representative of the particular wines involved and NOT the quality of winemaking in each state.
I tell you this because one of the wines they deemed “undrinkable” came from Massachusetts (see the image above). The wine, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc called “Nobksa Red” comes from the Cape Cod Winery in Falmouth. But there are half a dozen or so wineries in Massachusetts, at least one of which I know produces some excellent wines.
Here’s an interactive gallery of all the wines they tried. You can click on each bottle for a closeup image and a short review of that particular wine, and you can also display them grouped by their ratings (excellent, good, bad, and undrinkable). One of their favorites was a Muscat from Jewell Towne Vineyards in New Hampshire, only about a half an hour’s ride from our house. They also make a port and a couple of different varieties of eiswein (ice wine). I think I’ll have to go check them out sometime.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]
I agree with the WAshington wine…from Canoe Ridge, it is very nice and I really loved their Merlot Reserve but I’m not a fan of the BV Rutherford Cabernet…I thought it was overpriced and sort of sludgy…and we would have stopped at the Lemelson Winery in Oregon, but it was closed the day we drove by so I don’t know what any of their wines taste like. I haven’t had any other of the state wines listed…and most likely, I’ve not had very many other state wines…I’m pretty much a west coast drinker.
I’m still impressed when you remind me how close you live to your neighboring states. It’s true, I’m only 2 hours from Oregon and about 3 from Canada, but I’m so used to driving eternity drives to get somewhere else, I’m envious of your proximity to other places.