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By Michael Hastings
JOURNAL FOOD EDITOR
(Photo) Andrew Rodgers (left) and Steve Bumgarner swirl glasses of wine before sampling them during a blind taste-off between North Carolina wines and wines from California, Italy and Germany.
(Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll)
As a co-owner of Camel City Cafe & Wine Bar downtown, John Hughes gets asked about North Carolina wine all the time.
The burning question is, “Is it any good?”
The fact that Camel City Cafe offers a rotating selection of North Carolina wines on its extensive wine list should answer that question. But perceptions about wine tend to carry a mixture of skepticism, snobbery and subjectivity.
Hughes likes quite a few North Carolina wines, and he says he thinks that the state, and particularly the Yadkin Valley, has great potential.
So he went looking for a way to answer the question a bit more concretely. “I wanted to demystify the perception that North Carolina wines can’t compete with wines from the rest of the world,” Hughes said.
He came up with a blind tasting that pitted seven North Carolina wines against seven wines from California, Italy and Germany. He matched wines by the varietal (type of grape) and, except in one case, by price.
Then he invited eight people from the community to come taste. He didn’t tell them what wines they would be drinking or how many would be from North Carolina. The wines were served in carafes with numbers on the bottom that coordinated with numbers on the bottles, which were out of sight. So tasters could see the color, but their only other impressions came from what their noses and tastebuds told them.
Hughes invited Andrew Rodgers, the executive director of the RiverRun Film Festival; Curtis Leonard, a partner in Leonard Ryden Burr real-estate company; Jeff Smith of Smitty’s Notes; Sherri Nielson, the executive director of the Sawtooth School for Visual Art; Lauren Rippey, the editor of Winston-Salem Monthly (a publication of Media General, which owns the Winston-Salem Journal); Steve Bumgarner, a partner of Capture Public Relations & Marketing; myself; and Denise Franklin, the general manager of WFDD radio station. (Franklin also brought along a guest, John Babek.)
The group assembled Oct. 23 consisted of mostly regular wine drinkers who claimed a beginning or intermediate knowledge of wine. All had tasted more than a few North Carolina wines.
Hughes’ tasting sheet asked for a score of one through 10, plus such information as the varietal and whether the taster could tell whether a wine was from North Carolina.
Tasters guessed which wines were from North Carolina about 25 percent of the time. Few could guess the varietal.
Hughes admits that the tasting doesn’t prove the quality of North Carolina wine. But he wanted to show that given a choice, the average wine drinker will find North Carolina wines to be as good or better than other bottles at least some of the time.
And that he did show.
People can debate the choices of the wines, or even the tasters. I even have a bone or two to pick myself. But I do think the tasting at least showed that North Carolina is making some good wines.
Of the seven pairings, North Carolina wines were preferred in three instances, and one pairing resulted in a tie.
The 2004 Childress Vineyards Signature Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon ($60) beat out the 2003 Silver Oak Anderson Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($60, California). Though this is not one of Silver Oak’s top wines, this is a highly respected California winery. (Childress’ chutzpah, as one taster put it, in charging $60 for a North Carolina wine could be the subject of another story.) The bottom line, though, is that this group preferred the $60 North Carolina wine over the $60 California wine.
The 2005 Raffaldini Sangiovese ($16) topped the 2000 Fossi Chianti Classico ($15, Italy). The Raffaldini wine has merits. But the Fossi wine tasted oxidized and put off several tasters. I personally felt that it was over the hill, making it an easy contest.
The most interesting win for North Carolina was the preference for Westbend’s 2005 Barrel Fermented Chardonnay ($18) over the 2005 Kistler Carneros Chardonnay ($70, California). Kistler gets high ratings and high prices for its chardonnay, but six out of eight tasters preferred Westbend’s. That makes Westbend’s seem like a heck of a value, especially considering that Robert Parker Jr., an influential wine critic, consistently rates Kistler’s wines at more than 90 points out of 100.
Hanover Park’s 2001 Cabernet Franc ($15) tied with the 2005 Lang and Reed Cabernet Franc ($24, California), with the majority of tasters enjoying both wines.
The contests in which non-North Carolina wines won included the 2006 Rosenblum Kathy’s Cuvee Viognier ($19, California) against the 2006 Zimmerman Viognier ($20) - from the Zimmerman Vineyards in Davidson County, not the winery of the same name in Randolph County. Zimmerman’s Viognier - made on the side by Childress’ winemaker, Mark Friszolowski - has gotten a lot of buzz, but it had tough competition in the Rosenblum, rated 87 points by Parker. And the contest was close; the average scores were only a half-point apart.
Childress’ 2004 Barrel Select Syrah lost out to the 2004 Lincourt Syrah, ($20, California), whose previous vintage got 91 points from Wine Spectator magazine.
Westbend’s 2006 Riesling ($13) lost to the 2006 Loosen “Dr. L” Riesling ($12), from Ernest Loosen, an esteemed German producer.
The average scores for all the wines were as follows: Childress cab, 8; Silver Oak cab, 7.875; Lincourt syrah, 6.75; Loosen Riesling, 6.625; Rosenblum viognier, 6.125; Hanover Park cab franc, 6; Lang & Reed cab franc, 6; Childress syrah, 5.875; Raffaldinii sangiovese, 5.625; Zimmerman viognier, 5.625; Westbend chardonnay, 5; Westbend Riesling, 4.75; Kistler chardonnay, 4.125; Fossi Chianti, 4.
Now some people familiar with these wines are probably re-evaluating the results in their heads. Yes, you can argue that Raffaldini might not have won against a different Chianti, or even a different vintage of the Fossi. Similarly, it could be said that even a lot of very good $12 German Rieslings would have lost out to Loosen’s Dr. L.
Is this the last word on the state of North Carolina wine? Absolutely not.
“But it’s a place to start the discussion,” Hughes said. “I think I did show that these wines can compete. And they’re getting better all the time.”
Hughes said he is thinking of doing another tasting in six months or a year with a whole new set of wines. Stay tuned.
■ Michael Hastings, the Journal’s Food editor, can be contacted by phone at 727-7394, e-mail at mhastings@wsjournal.com, or mail at c/o Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27102. His most recent columns can be read on our Web site at www.journalnow.com.
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