Thurston Wolfe Winery

In my previous post I wrote that Washington wineries were more serious/less friendly than their counterparts in New York. I'm going to provisionally retract that opinion on the grounds that my n may have been too low.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Thurston Wolfe Winery, which turned out to be much more like what I'm used to. I and my co-conspirator had a chance to chat with one of the proprietors, Becky Yeaman, who was knowledgeable, eager to talk about their wines, and not above dishing dirt on some of their competitors. Even better she didn't charge us a tasting fee, much less $5 a head.

But let's talk about their wines. I think overall that their selection was pretty high quality, but with one caveat that I'll get to shortly. In particular there's a few I'd like to highlight:

• 2005 Dr. Wolfe's Family Red: In NY almost all of the Finger Lakes wineries have one (or more) blended red table wines, often with cute names and/or labels, that can be had for about $9 a bottle. Some of them are good, but none of them are great, which primed us to be a little skeptical about the $15/btl asking price for the Family Red. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of this product; its been blended with care and has a nice complexity that I don't typically associate with a table wine.


• 2005 Zephyr Ridge Petite Sirah: This is a big, meaty, tannic red. Quite nice, not sure it's quite worth $20/btl, but tasty none-the-less.


• 2005 JTW Port: This, I think, was the most interesting of their offerings. I've tried quite a few ports and many of them, especially the ones typically found in supermarkets, seem to loose quite a bit of character during the fortification process. On the other hand, this particular port manages to avoid that pitfall. It has 10% r.s., but you don't really notice because you're busy actually tasting the grapes.

Now on to the bad news. There's something wrong with their Orange Muscat grapes. I tried two Orange Muscat wines, the 2006 Orange Muscat and the 2005 Sweet Rebecca, both of which had an unpleasant finishing note evocative of rubbing alcohol/cheap vodka. This taste was prominent in the Orange Muscat but masked somewhat by the sweetness of the Sweet Rebecca. I went back and tried them a second time, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things, but its definitely there in both wines.