Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Wagner Winery Horizontal Tasting

Okay. I must admit that I have become a bit cynical about the quality of Finger Lakes red wines. I believe better wine can be produced, but the winemakers are failing to produce it on a consistent basis. Now to carry on my thesis, I took 2 Wagner Vineyards wines, both Cabernet Franc and both vintage 2005. One of them was a special release with fruit forwardness, bits of oak and vanilla. Very nice and very well balanced; priced at $20. The other, the standard release Cab Franc was lighter on the fruit, overpowered by oak, and just completely out of balance; priced at $15. Even after being open for 2 days it didn't really even begin to work itself out. I wonder if the efforts to make those 2 releases were combined into a single concerted effort to produce 1 high quality release would have resulted in Wagner red wine utopia? One will never know. I have a feeling it is a number of factors at play that are singing me the red wine blues - weather, customer demand, perceptions in customer tastes, and business cost factors. Off to my day job, see you in March.