Perinton's Casa Larga wins international wine competition
Casa Larga's Fiori Vidal ice wine goes down cold and is strongly sweet, but not cloyingly so.
The 2005 vintage of the Perinton-made wine took home the gold from this year's International Wine & Spirits Competition for best dessert wine. The award was handed out in England earlier this month.
The IWSC is generally considered one of the world's leading wine competitions, alongside such events as France's VinExpo and the San Francisco International Wine Competition.
"It's just fabulous for us to win this," said Stacy M. Kurtz, brand manager for Casa Larga Vineyards.
The dessert wine trophy is new for the competition, combining what had been ice wine and botrytis trophies. The Casa Larga wine was measured up against sweet wines from Germany, Canada, the United States, Italy, Chile, Australia and South Africa, said Pip Mortimer, tasting coordinator for the competition.
"Traditionally the ice wine trophy used to go equally to Germany and Canada, so for the U.S. to come up with the winner of this trophy is quite amazing," Mortimer said.
Casa Larga bottled about 800 cases of the 2005 — a notably large batch for the winery. The winery sold out of the award-winning vintage last month, Kurtz said. "It's a catch-22 — we were happy people were so enthused," she said. "On the other hand, it was: 'Omigosh, we're out of the vintage.'"
The winery released its 2006 Fiori Vidal earlier this month. That vintage yielded 400 cases of 375-milliliter bottles. The bottles sell for $44.99 each.
"We got lucky with (the 2005 vintage) quantity," Kurtz said. "I don't know if we'll have that size batch again."
Making ice wine typically is extremely weather dependent, with the grape harvest coming after a below-freezing cold snap.
"I call it extreme winemaking," said Bruce Nicholson, chief winemaker at Inniskillin Winery, which is located on the Niagara Peninsula in the Canadian province of Ontario and also in British Columbia. "With Chardonnay, I know the weeks I'm going to do (that) every year."
Inniskillin, whose dessert wines are one of the biggest sellers in duty-free shops worldwide, was a 2001 IWSC winner. It is owned by Perinton-based wine and spirits giant Constellation Brands Inc.
The Fiori Vidal, made with vidal grapes grown in the vineyard adjacent to the Turk Hill Road winery, starts when winter freezes the grapes on the vine. Those frozen grapes are then pressed for the concentrated syrupy juice inside. That ferments into a sweet wine typically sipped after a meal.
Casa Larga, owned by the Colaruotolo family, employs 15 full time, and adds seasonal help for the fall harvest and Christmas retail season. It produces about 22,000 cases of various wines annually, Kurtz said.