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.
