Cornell studying how to improve Finger Lakes Rieslings(1)
Rieslings already are putting the Finger Lakes wine region on the map.
A group of Cornell University researchers is trying to make the variety even better.
Among them is Anna Katharine Mansfield, an enologist who is nurturing the Riesling Terroir Project, which seeks to determine the defining characteristics of what's bottled in the Finger Lakes and precisely how Rieslings grown on various Finger Lakes differ from each other. Ultimately, this would mean marketers could talk up the qualities that are truly unique to our Rieslings or to specific lakes. And that, in the wine world, is how reputations are made.
At the heart of the project is the fact that the taste and smell of wines, especially Rieslings, express subtle differences due to their terroir — local conditions such as soil, weather patterns and growing practices. If variations can be captured and described through lab analysis and equally rigorous taste testing, then Mansfield and her team can pinpoint how local microclimates shape wine flavors and aromas.
Mansfield, who has developed an expertise in cold-climate winemaking, came to upstate New York a year ago from Minnesota. (At the University of Minnesota, she worked on a project that bred grapes that thrived 40 degrees below zero.)
"There's a whole new world of potential vineyard sites in northern regions, and I was a small part of that," she says.
One of the people she works with is Justine Vanden Heuvel, an assistant professor of viticulture at Cornell who identifies compounds in the vineyard that lead to specific flavors and aromas in the wine. Her technique is to eliminate variables in test batches of grapes from different lakes (working with farmers on consistent grafting methods, for example). The idea is to grow grapes the same way on various lakes, so any differences in flavor can be attributed to environmental factors (weather and soil, for example, which she's monitoring and testing on different lakes).
"There's an old expression that 'great wine is made in the vineyard,' and it's true," Vanden Heuvel says.
With the grapes produced from Vanden Heuvel's work, Mansfield has been working to standardize the winemaking process, too: yeast type, fermentation temperature and other factors determining aroma and flavor. The wine was subject to a "sensory evaluation component" — a panel tasting by any other name. After all, "consumers won't be running chemical analyses on their wines, they'll be tasting it," says Mansfield.
