Regional Wine Week: The Best and Worst Maryland Offered This Year
It’s Drink Local Wine‘s second annual Regional Wine Week. My wine rack is comepltely bare of any local wines, so how about we do like a sitcom and run a clips show with the two best and two worst local notes I’ve taken over the past year.
The interesting thing about this note…
Very light straw color. Cold steely nose. Spritzy and zesty palette. 74.
…was that it doesn’t sound negative at all. The score wasn’t even all that bad either (74) but somehow it all came together to inspire me to take the picture to the right. Editors note: This wine was actually from Virginia. Don’t know how it snuck into the Maryland wine post.
Elsewhere, the local wine fun continued.
Great up front. Pale straw color. Floral aromas, especially honeysuckle. Great palette with lots of steel acidity and even some rocky, gravelly mouth feel. The finish just fell apart though. Violent and unpleasant, I kept trying and hoping for improvement until I eventually gave up on it. 70.
Awarding a 70 sounds downright benevolent after that note. The funny thing is that this was a wine I’d sampled in the tasting room and liked enough to buy and bring home. Two months later, things were clearly different.
On to the good stuff, Elk Run had two of my favorites for this year:
2007 Elk Run Viognier. Nice. Springy apple and peach. Lots of acidity. 82.
Like I always say, I am nothing if not brief.
Still the leader in the clubhouse in Maryland is the 2007 Elk Run Gewurztraminer Cold Friday Vineyard
The first sniff gave me the same sort of I-don’t-know that I get in a lot of Maryland wines. I don’t quite know what it is (Old Bay?) but MD wines, both red and white, but it’s a little sulfuric, sharp… not particularly unpleasant but just distinct. The mystery aroma blew off after a few minutes. Past that, there was apple and beach, mostly round, full aromas. The wine had a Juicy Fruit, honeyed taste initially, very layered. Good acidity. The whole thing was almost a little wild. A nice, dry, light caramel finish followed. The wine changed for the better over several hours, giving out more fruit and maturing into complexity. On open, the wine was more of a New World style and after some time it developed a hint of minerality and Old World Characteristics, like something Alsacian. 88.
Eighty eight! Take that, more-well-known wine regions!
If you’re into more local stuff, go check out drinkocalwine.com and click through to some of the posts Dave McIntyre has called out this week. Happy local drinking!
