No need to cry yet, but vintage off to a wet start this year

Paul Vigna/The Wine
ClassroomChaddsford Winery won the Keystone Cup at the annual Pennsylvania Wine Competition. The judging took place in Connecticut in February and the results were announced April 19 during the PWA's annual workshop at The Penn Stater. Taking the Keystone Cup was Chaddsford's Niagara.

I took five weeks off to tend to 22 students in a Lebanon Valley College class and my full-time job at the Patriot-News and here's what I have missed. Nothing but rain and more rain. Watching Wednesday's moderate showers is a reminder of why vintages around here can differ so much from year to year. Granted, it's still early in the growing season, but by this time last year the area has sweated through a number of unseasonably warm days. The vines started two to four weeks ahead of the norm and stayed that way the remainder of the growing season, to the point where winemakers (yes, Carl, I did try and keep up on my reading despite not writing) started harvesting in August. This year? It will be different, just based on how it has started, with above-average rain and below-average degree days. Harvests ultimately rise or fall on that final month leading up to harvest, but the nuances that affect quality extend through the entire growing season. So, we'll see.

In the meantime, most regional wineries are beginning to roll out their whites from 2010, which across the board should show more flavor, more color and offer the buzz of a hornet (alcohol contents will be, on average, higher than norm). They are definitely worth a try.

Sometimes in the newspaper business we'll be so fixated on one event that we'll finally stop and take a page and put together a list of what else readers (and us) missed. In that vein, here are a couple highlights from April.

a, Sorrenti Cherry Valley left the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail, leaving eight wineries still bound at the lip. Sorrenti was one of the founding wineries of the trail, which dates back to 1997. In addition to its winery in Saylorsburg, the Sorrentis last year opened a shop in downtown Easton. It will be interesting moving forward to see which wine trails shrink and which ones expand. What is a certainty is that these entities will change over the next few years.

b, Maryland wineries and wine drinkers got what they wanted early in the month, as direct shipping passed and will go into effect July 1. A lot of people were involved in finally getting this passed, but they should probably call this the Borden bill in recognition of the work that Adam Borden put in during his term as head of Marylanders for Better Beer & Wine Laws.  That will make some folks wince who despised his style, but Borden's presence invigorated an effort that seemed to be stuck on a treadmill for years. Here are stories from The Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Business Journal.

c, I'm expecting to have results from the Maryland Winemasters Choice awards by this weekend at the latest. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania announced the winners of its state competitions and Chaddsford Winery nearly swept the Best of Show categories. Its Merlot won Best Red and its -- surprise -- Niagara took Best White and Best Wine, the latter netting the Keystone Cup. Nissley Estate's Black Raspberry won for Best Fruit wine. Shade Mountain, Seven Mountains and Arrowhead, in addition to Chaddsford, all had wines that earned double golds. Here's a list of all those wine earning recognition.
   

d, Pennsylvania has an enologist for the first time since early 2008. Denise Gardner beat out 35 other candidates and began her job May 2. She gives the state a needed traveling resource on making wine, complementing the extensive education that viticulturalist Mark Chien provides to those who grow grapes around the state. Gardner will be based in the Food Science Department at Penn State University but has a lot of miles ahead of her, paying visits to and making acquaintance with winemakers from Pittsburgh and Eric to Allentown and the Brandywine Valley. Chien had this to say about Gardner in one of his recent newsletters: "On a personal note, I have known Denise since she was a sophomore in the outstanding ag science program at Conrad Weiser HS in Berks County. It’s rather unusual for a young student to express an interest in grapes and wine, but there she was, doing papers on phylloxera, grapevine tissue propagation with the help of faculty at Cornell, a co-fermentation experiment with Joanne Levengood at Manatawny Creek, then traveling to France for a summer to work at the research lab at Lallemand and another summer in Napa to help Taryn Bauerle with her root physiology research. Denise is an overachiever who always delivers more than is expected of her. She graduated from the Penn State food science program with a minor in horticulture and went on to get her M.S. with Bruce Zoecklein at Virginia Tech, doing research on electronic nose technology. After VT she landed the top sensory job at Vinquiry, which morphed into Enartis and moved to Napa Valley. Her heart, however, was in the East and so she has returned to help the wine industry in Pennsylvania, where she is the ultimate example of a home grown product. Denise is young, bright, enthusiastic, talented and energetic. Her accomplishments will be measured largely by her work but I think what will make her a fine extension educator is her personality, which is unabashedly optimistic, friendly and polite. She will run circles around me but I hope that together we can deliver extension programs that will really push the quality of Pennsylvania wines even further. I hope that everyone in the wine industry will welcome and help her as she learns again who, what and where we are. We are fortunate to get her, persons of her caliber are in high demand and I am certain she will make a major contribution here."

e, Finally, Pennsylvania held its annual workshop in State College on April 19. Spokesperson Jennifer Eckinger noted the state "wine family" gets larger every year. The state now has more than 140 wineries and another 25 or 30 licenses have been granted for new ones.  Those numbers still come as a surprise to a lot of people who live in Pennsylvania. One way the Pennsylvania Winery Association tried to publicize its quantity and quality of wineries was a statewide toast last summer. Eckinger said the plan this summer is to roll out a promotion called "There's a Story Behind Every Cork." "We're in the process of developing that for the individual wineries," she said by phone recently. "We're very excited about it. It's an opportunity, once again, to get the story out about Pennsylvania wineries and showcase the industry, and also engage the public by having them submit their favorite stories about Pennsylvania wines and hopefully engage others to visit other wineries at well." This will culminate with Pennsylvania Wine Day, the date still to be chosen.