Red state, blue state wines on Forbes
With convention season now upon us, Eric Arnold and I got in the mood and tasted some wines from blue states and the more difficult–viticulturally speaking–red states over on Forbes.com (with videos!).
With California, Washington, and Oregon making something like 95 percent of American wine and coming up as blue on the electoral map, the challenge is to find good red state wines. I won’t steal the thunder of the piece but I will say that the wines we tried were surprisingly good. Here’s the quick list:
* Galena Cellars, General’s Reserve, from Obama’s home state of Illinois (find this wine)
* Heron Hill, Riesling, Finger Lakes, NY (find this wine)
* Caduceus, Arizona Stronghold, McCain’s home state, yes, but also now where Tool lead singer Maynard Keenan is growing vines (find this wine)
* Barboursville, Barbera, 2006 from Virginia, a state that swung red last time but is very much in play this year (and former Governor Mark Warner, a vineyard owner, is the Keynote speaker in tomorrow’s Democratic convention; find this wine).
I tried to recreate this lineup for a corporate tasting while I am in Chicago next month but none of the three non-Illinois wines were available in the market via wine-searcher. And none of the retailers I checked online even stocked the Illinois wine. It’s really too bad I can’t ship the wines there from an out of state retailer now that it is illegal. So I had to choose another theme for that tasting, alas.
On November 5th, 2008 at 6:06 pm ,Red states, failed merger, global wine - sipped and spit | Dr Vino's wine blog wrote:
[…] states With more states turning blue, a reader writes in to say that it will be even harder to do a red state-blue state article again now that Virginia and Colorado are blue. Indeed! Texas, over to […]