Hudson Berkshire Beverage Trail

Lots of exciting things are happening around where I grew up in Upstate New York. (I hate calling it Upstate, but since that's what most out-of-staters tend to understand as "not New York City", that's what I'll call it.) For example, we have a new food co-op, a vegan bakery, and that's just what I can think of in Troy.

And then I found a brochure for the Hudson Berkshire Beverage Trail, which is a collection of 5 wineries, a distillery and brewery in Rensselaer and Columbia Counties, and also just across the border in Massachusetts. The locations span north to south from Castleton to Germantown, and east to west from the Hudson River to New Marlborough, MA.

Jeff and I were able to visit two of these locations with my dad and mom (acting graciously as our designated driver). We hoped to visit the locations in Chatham as well, but we'll just have to save that for another day.

Brookview Station Winery is located at Goold Orchards, where we previously picked 15 pounds of raspberries. The winery offers a decent selection of wines made on site from non-grape fruits; mostly apples and pears. The wines I tasted from them were crisp and mostly dry, but the great thing about apples is that they tend to make a dry wine taste sweeter than a dry grape wine would taste.

Brookview Station also provides many other wines from New York wineries in the Finger Lakes region. From this selection I tasted many interesting wines ranging from a plain but ultimately very drinkable Cayuga, to a bold and spicy Baco Noir to a Cabernet Franc bursting with currant flavors.

The tasting was 6$ for 6 wines, and all of the wines that they offer for tasting are also on sale at the store.

Just down Route 9 from Castleton is Harvest Spirits Distillery in Valatie. Harvest Spirits has grown out of Golden Harvest Farms, a huge apple orchard that I would see every time we'd drive down Route 9 to visit relatives in Germantown. The distillery is actually quite a bit smaller than I envisioned, but it's quite awe-inspiring to walk inside and see hand decorated aging barrels and an enormous, beautiful copper still.

The tasting was 3$ for a flight of their spirits: Core Vodka (made from apples), Applejack and Pear Brandy. I'm really not much of a drinker of straight distilled spirits, preferring to mix in something non-alcoholic to make it more drinkable to my palate. The Core Vodka, however, was a very smooth and sugary vodka that I was able to sip without choking on. I'm not sure if it would be easily discernible from other high quality vodkas in a mixed drink, but could easily win a blind taste test with common mixers such as Absolut.

The Applejack made my eyes water as I sipped it, and honestly my taste buds were too burnt from the vodka for me to really appreciate the fine flavors of distilled apple cider. Apparently, this is a traditional drink made from freezing bottles of hard cider and removing the ice.

Finally up was the Pear Brandy, which honestly was not something I would want to taste again. I will sum up how Jeff and I felt about the beverage with this before and after shot of trying it out:



Overall, I'm glad places like Harvest Spirits exist, because usually when you think of vodka you don't think local, you think of Sweden or Russia or someplace thousands of miles from home. (Unless you happen to live in Åhus.)

Cool Things: Southern Vermont Garlic & Herb Festival

Vermont is a fun state filled with amazing ski resorts, country stores, great diners, hippies, awesome breweries, and a garlic festival.

I couldn't go last year for some reason, so I was thrilled to get the opportunity to go this past labor day weekend. Really, it's hard to be prepared for how much garlic is present in one place and at one time. And there are a huge number of garlic aficionados, judging by the turnout.

Considering that I can't stomach raw garlic, and just got a shiny new pair of braces put on, I wasn't up to sampling much, but Jeff was up for the task. The number of varieties of garlic was mind boggling. Like apples, each variety has a different flavor, level of tartness, acidity and is best suited for different applications.

We ultimately came home with 5 pounds of German White for pickling and roasting, and a pound each of Music, Zemo, Hnat and Carpathian. Considering how quickly Jeff and I tore through the garlic stash my mom bought for me at last year's garlic fest, I'm sure these won't be around for long.

Another fun part of the festival was all of the food and drinks available for tasting. It was really sad for me, actually, because I can't eat pretzels, chips or nuts for the next two years, and those are the vessels most vendors provide for sampling their various dips, salsas and sauces. I let Jeff do the tasting, and I scoped out one or two vendors that offered bread to sample with, including some delicious balsamic from pastamoré, who apparently are not local to Vermont in any way.

There were also plenty of wineries offering samples, as well as one distillery that sold some sort of delicious and hugely expensive brandy. The wines we are sampling in the adjacent photo are from Honora Winery, which makes a delicious Merlot that we bought. They do grow their own grapes which I thought was interesting. Many Vermont wines focus on local fruits, not necessarily grapes. They just purchased a tasting room in Wilmington that used to belong to my family's old favorite North River Winery that we were sad to see go out of business recently. I'm glad that the location will not be going to waste!

But the best bang for our buck was a tasting set in the back of the festival where we were able to taste a flight of at least a dozen local wines for free. I really wish I had kept some notes about the wines, as some were absolutely divine. Some expensive nearly 100$ ice wines were part of the tasting. (By the way, I am not double-fisting in the photo above, nearly offering my mom's glass for a refill as she took the photo.)

Finally, no trip to Vermont is complete without a trip to the Blue Benn Diner. Tucked away just off of routes 7 and 9 in Bennington, located in a quaint train car, the Blue Benn is certainly a delight for local vegetarians and vegans. Nearly a half page of their menu is dedicated to meat free dining, and Jeff and I were both excited to eat the veggie-loaf with gravy. It was soft enough for me to get through with my new braces, and savory and delicious as well. I would definitely recommend this place to any veg*n who finds their way to southern Vermont.

(Photo credit: my mom took all the photos in this post. I brought my camera and took exactly 0 shots the whole time.)



Garlic

Raspberry Picking

One thing I miss about living in a somewhat rural area is u-pick farms. I have many fond memories of apple and raspberry picking at Goold's Orchard going back to at least a kindergarten field trip many years ago. Now that I live in Boston, my options are finding a vehicle and driving at least an hour away or waiting until I go home to visit my parents and picking from one of the many local u-pick locations.

Jeff and I were excited to take a trip to Goold's after hitting up Vermont's Garlic Festival on labor day weekend. Our goal was to pick as close to 18 pounds of raspberries as we could before hopping in the car and going back to Boston.

We searched high and low, nearly picking a huge swath of bushes completely dry for at least two hours before calling it a day. Our final tally was 15 pounds - enough to add to our primary fermenter with some sugar and yeast to make 6 gallons of raspberry wine.

As of now, it's still sitting in the secondary, bubbling away, but we're extremely excited to taste it in a year or so.

(Photo credits go to my mom.)



Raspberry

Wine Making Update

Jeff and I just bottled 28 bottles of Chiswick Winery Cherry Wine. It started out a few months ago with two giant 96-oz cans of cherries (which completely stripped my can opener into uselessness), 12-lbs of sugar and some yeast. It is already a very full-bodied wine and I can't wait to try it out as it matures. Hopefully by Valentine's Day next year, it will be a perfect wine to drink to celebrate the holiday.

Jeff and I also engaged in a taste test of our Sauvignon Blanc as it turned four months old on the 11th. We bought a bottle of 2009 120 Sauvignon Blanc from Chile, which was approximately 12$, thinking it might provide a good comparison. I administered the blind taste test to Jeff to ensure that he remained as unbiased as possible. The 120 wine started with a fruity bouquet, and had a luscious, robust taste that lived up to the description on the back of the bottle. Unknowingly, we purchased what is, so far, the best Sav Blanc that either of us has ever tasted, setting the bar really high for our young, home brewed concoction. The Chiswick Winery Sauvignon Blanc had a bouquet that you could tell will mature into something resembling that of the 120 wine, however it did include a couple of off-putting scents, which will hopefully go away in time. The flavor was much more subtle than it was at 2 weeks old, but still has a lot of maturing to do. Jeff was easily able to tell the two wines apart.

At four months old I'd say our Sauvignon Blanc is probably right about where it should be, but probably isn't quite ready to be cracked open for a good drink. For cooking it is superb, and would be perfectly suitable for a wine drinker who doesn't have a terribly picky palate.

That leaves our Cider Wine, which we haven't tasted since bottling it in late November. I think we'll safely leave this, and the Cherry Wine, to age for at least 6 months before drinking. I'm looking forward to how they all turn out, and also looking forward to drinking them, as it's getting increasingly difficult to store so many bottles of wine in our apartment kitchen!

Next up, I think, will be a pineapple wine. We hope to follow that up in the summer with a raspberry wine, and we're also considering buying a 1 gallon carboy to make a few unique wines to test out that we won't necessarily want 30 bottles of. It's been getting much easier making and bottling the wines, now that Jeff and I have made three batches. Our racking skills have greatly improved, and it only takes us one try to get the siphon hose started. The last two wines have had no sediment introduced into the final product. And our families have been doing a wonderful job saving bottles for us, greatly reducing the cost of our hobby. (Did you know that bottles can be the most expensive component per bottle, more expensive even than the ingredients?)

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Sauvignon Blanc

Sauvignon Blanc

Jeff and I bottled 29 bottles of our Sauvignon Blanc a few weeks ago. It was an interesting process. The kit we bought came with a neat siphon gadget that has a plunger in the bottom. We figured that we'd put these in the bottles, push down to start the flow of wine, and then let up when the bottle was full. Bad idea. They filled up about half way before the siphon lost its suck and the wine stopped flowing. Then we had to restart the siphon, which can be a messy production consisting of water getting all over the floor. Finally we decided to use the siphon hose straight up without the auto-siphon at the end. Until I realized that the flow valve might be a good idea to use we made quite a mess as wine spilled all over the floor at a high flow rate while I was going in between bottles.

The wine has been sitting for almost a month, and we have opened and drank a few bottles already. I'm hoping that the mildly strong bouquet will go away with time, I think it probably comes with the sulfites that are added right before bottling the wine. Honestly, I would like to do without sulfites entirely but I am not sure how else to sterilize the wine. I know that some people do without, but I would be worried about wild yeasts giving our wine a vinegar taste. The wine kit also recommends adding the sulfites if you want to let the wine age for more than six months in bottles. Clearly, I'd like to let my wine age, so I added it just to make sure it won't go bad.

We'll try some before Thanksgiving to make sure it tastes good enough to bring to Jeff's for the holiday. If it's good by then, it'll also be good enough to give as holiday gifts in December. I just need to print out some labels to put on the bottles.

Right now our cider wine is settling. We used sparkalloids, which are a mix of some polysaccharides and diatomaceous earth, as far as I can tell on my Google searches. It takes longer to clear than isinglass, but I'm really happy not to be putting any fish bladder in my wine! For our next batch, Jeff and I will have to find a wine kit that doesn't have any pre-packed inside the box. (The first wine kit we purchased came with the grape juice as well as all the packets of sterilizers and fining agents.)