Hi folks,

I spent the second weekend in May at Maine Wild Wine Fest, a natural wine fair in a big pretty barn in the middle of a forested state park, water on three sides, home to a bunch of cows happy that it wasn’t raining.

I’d been invited to lead a workshop on the past, present and future of New England wine, and it was nice to have an excuse to come back to Portland. The center of town is really walkable, there’s a lot of places to eat and drink well (many set up by Brooklyn transplants, sorry we keep moving there!), and there’s another independent bookstore every five or six blocks, an encouraging sign of a robust civic culture.

What did we talk about in the workshop? Here’s a little summary, if you’re curious, along with a couple of highlights from the fest, some places I can recommend if you’re in Portland later this summer, and some advice on what to do if a natural wine fair comes to your town.

What are some ways to understand wine in the Northeast?

The workshop was in between the two sessions of the fair, and most people there were afternoon ticket holders, so this was a warmup before they went in. (Some of them were producers from other places who were curious about the local wine scene — always intimidating!) As usual, there was a big range of background knowledge and context among the people there.

One of my goals in the workshop was to lay a little groundwork for attendees who’d be carrying their glasses over next door and tasting with producers from the region — tools to ask good questions of the practitioners they’d have the chance to meet, or frameworks for understanding the things they might come across.

It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to grab a glass and wander over next door to talk to somebody making wine in New England immediately after reading this newsletter, but here’s what we talked about, and what we drank:

Something like 85% of U.S. wine is grown and made in California. Lump in the rest of the West Coast and the proportion exceeds 9 in 10.

Our imagination of what American wine can be, in other words, is dominated by the West Coast: the bulk wine industry of the Central Valley shaping our expectations around what grocery store wine tastes like; night picks done by professionalized crews; large vineyards whose size traces back to 19th century settler land grants; smoke taint from wildfires; the necessity of irrigation; certificate sommeliers comparing pinot noir from the Willamette Valley or the Sonoma Coast to red Burgundy; "I don’t like buttery chardonnay”; bottles of $$$ cult Napa cab; the idea of “winemaker” as a job that doesn’t directly involve vineyard work.

The West Coast wasn’t always the gravitational center of the country’s wine industry, though. Before the Gold Rush, before California’s acreage under vine exploded during Prohibition, there was an alternate history we’ve mostly lost built on hybrids like catawba, found growing wild in the forest outside of Asheville, North Carolina at the beginning of the 19th century, by 1860 the most-planted wine grape in the country. Vines were farmed on hillside terraces in the Ohio River Valley by women who’d immigrated from the Rhineland. Sherry soleras aged on rooftops outside of Hammondsport. Champagne-method sparkling wines rested on the lees in caverns underneath the streets of downtown St. Louis.

Challenges, cultivars, growing conditions, all pretty darn distinct from the West Coast. Mounding up dirt over vines cut down to renewal to protect them from winter freezes, humidity + disease pressure, frost, hybrid varieties.

But as much work as there is to do just to explain why wine from New York doesn’t, and shouldn’t, taste like wine from California — it’s a different landscape with a different history, etc, “New World” is not inherently warmer than France, whatever— there’s even more work to be done when you swing up to the Northeast.

As John McCarroll notes in his Wine Enthusiast piece on New England wine — sellout! (jk it’s very good, you should just read that, really) — “The oldest vineyard in all of New England is Sakonnet, in Rhode Island. It was planted in 1975.”

The cultivars going into the ground aren’t wild children like catawba or delaware, 19th-century jewel of American wine grapes, or French-American crosses like vidal and seyval. They’re new, ultra coldhardy graduates from the University of Minnesota, complicated family trees based on the v. riparia vines that can survive the winters of the Upper Midwest: grapes like la crescent, with its piney florals and razorsharp acidity; marquette, tea-leafy and brambly; frontenac in its three colors, surprisingly capable of bruléed richness.

Plantings are new, grapes themselves are new. (Marquette, for example, was released in I think 2007? I’m not checking my notes.)

I also saw a lot of l’Acadie at the fair, an old ‘50s Canadian hybrid widely planted in Nova Scotia that folks in Maine also like to work with.

But there are fruits here, too, older than the newest releases from Minnesota or 1950s French-Americans.

Glacial retreat allowed indigenous people to cultivate wild blueberries in Maine at just about the same time as apples were getting domesticated in Central Asia and grapevines were getting domesticated in the Caucuses. (Putting all that together in my spreadsheet led to this pleasing, all-in-one entry in my illustrated wine timeline):

Apples aren’t from here the way vines and blueberries are, but they’re here the way horses are: since the colonial encounter, adaptable and embedded in our national mythmaking, imagined as part of the landscape and occasionally wild within it, talked about with the fraught and weaponized word ‘heritage.’

New England is going to be marginal (keyword!), in terms of the struggle for ripeness and sunlight. We can expect producers to employ winemaking techniques — sparkling refermentation, multivintage blending, long lees aging, fortification or infusion — that people in marginal climates have used for generations to find richness places where richness doesn’t come from sunlight alone. You can expect bracing, electric acidity, fruit character that folds in the vegetal, lower potential alcohols.

What we’re planting and fermenting will reflect this, too. Grapes will have to be tough, and planting vinifera is going to be nearly impossible. (One of the more interesting questions at the workshop was someone wondering why we couldn’t just grow Maine cabernet sauvignon in a greenhouse.) Hybrid varieties will be part of the toolkit, for sure — but grapes alone will still be more difficult than exploring co-fermentation and letting other, hardier fruits join the party, especially if you want stable annual production.

That part, too, is important: the scale here is necessarily small. This won’t be a bulk wine region — it’s easily outcompeted by irrigated desert, at least while there’s still water there for it. Even east of the Mississippi there’s a lot more space and infrastructure to go big with grapes around the Great Lakes.

The present, and the immediate future, in this region, is handmade, and human-sized. Justifying the price that entails means focusing on wines that transmit place and feel distinctive — like they could come from nowhere else. Accessibility (in every sense of the word) becomes a challenge. (Financially speaking, one way you can maybe answer that challenge is by throwing a bunch of apples at it.)

👯“Novella”, early apples pressed through red marquette and white la crescent skins, a collaboration between Deirdre Heekin (La Garagista) and Willa Deeley (Disciple Cider), grapes are from a vineyard Deirdre farms in the Champlain Valley, apples are from the home farm in Barnard, Vermont.

Deirdre made the first East Coast hybrid wines I ever tasted as a baby wine professional, and I think for a lot of drinkers she is still a major touchstone for a serious approach to hybrid wines and wines beyond the West Coast + New York. (For example, she was the only non–West Coast producer named in Eric Asimov’s recent roundup of the last 50 years of American wine in the New York Times.)

But while Deidre does deserve credit for decades of pioneering work, I think one of its most important elements is the cultivation of a community of makers around her, people who she has mentored and have gone on to make wines and plant vines of their own. (It’s no coincidence that Willa’s cider project is called ‘disciple.’) Beyond highlighting Vermont, showing an apple-grape co-ferment, and featuring Deirdre (who wasn’t pouring at the fair this year), I also wanted to bring something that spoke to a family tree of influence and mentorship — the way that regions develop as regions, beyond a single cult producer.

🏵️ “Mountain Rose”, a deep skin-contact blend of pink + gold frontenac + la crescent farmed by NOK Vino across the Connecticut River, the highest-elevation vines in New Hampshire.

NOK is still the only wine that I’ve tasted from New Hampshire, and when I talk to Ryan Williams or Nico Kimberly about their work I’m constantly confronted with the degree to which the vines they farm and the hillsides they talk about are literally not on my mental map.

(It was with no small amount of satisfaction that I googled the address of the vineyard that went into this bottle and placed it exactly where it sat on the Connecticut River’s east bank, just across from one of the vineyards that Deirdre works with in Vermont. You can find it below if you look hard.)

NOK was also not at the fair, which met my other goal — to bring a couple of wines to share that people wouldn’t otherwise get the chance to taste, and try to represent as much breadth of possibility as I could.

🫐 “Still Blue”, a dry, savory still table wine from blueberries — 2.5 lbs of them per bottle — by RAS wines outside of Portland, ME.

Blueberries, even the tiny, high-acid + high-tannin wild blueberries that are going to give you your most successful results, have some downsides in terms of fermentation versus grapes or apples — low to the ground and so able to pick up more bacteria, quite thick-skinned (watch your extraction), and while high acidity / lower pH is good there’s not as much sugar in these as in grapes, and you might be a little short of stable alcohol levels.

RAS’ “Still Blue” sees five days of skin contact before pressing, and unlike their sparkling wines, which can get their texture from bubbles and autolysis, it’s chaptalized during fermentation to pick up a little extra richness before barrel aging. (Just like in Burgundy and other cool-climate regions where adding sugar to lengthen ferments and raise alcohol degree is commonplace.)

It was a way to bring us back to the very beginning, in a sense: to fruit that has been adapted to this landscape and interacted with by humans for 8,000+ years, and what fermenting it might let us see in it.

Any wine fair, even one in a pretty barn with lots of airflow and plenty of space to move around and happy cows outside, is going to feel pretty overwhelming at times. I’ve been doing this for a while, and it still hits me every now and again.

My personal hack, which is not particularly transferable, is to have a job — pour at a friend’s table, be invited to moderate a panel, etc — which gives me something to do and often a piece of furniture to stand behind. This is helpful for me! It is probably not a useful piece of advice!

Here are a few things that you could do, I think, that help:

Spit. Spit. Spit wine after you taste it. These days, there will usually be a stack of coffee cups near the front you can take so that you have a personal spit cup, which — as somebody who remembers the days when you had to fight past a mob to get to the spittoon, and watch out for cowboy vets arcing spit streams from four or six feet away — is a huge improvement.

I’m not saying you can’t have a little sip of special things, as a treat, on your day off, but it’s just math: if you go to a wine fair and try to drink everything you taste you will get sick, fucked up, unsafe, and unhappy. Do not do this. Taste things, slosh them around in your mouth, smell them before you taste them, spit them out. Spit wine.

Buddy system. I actually prefer to taste alone, most of the time! I can get distracted if I’m tasting with a friend or a group, unless we are very much on the same wavelength. But even if you’re like me, it’s nice to have somebody to split the room up with. Check in periodically and see what they really liked, and then go there! Two heads are better than one.

Slow tables are not bad wine. There are always some tables — the Comte de Voguë Musigny vertical at La Paulée, Gut Oggau at RAW NYC in 2016, the Jura nook at La Dive, whatever — that are going to be mobbed. There are also almost always tables that will have nobody in front of them at any given moment. (Sometimes, they were mobbed earlier and quiet now.) A crazy thing I’ve seen play out again and again is people avoiding those empty tables as though the fact that they’re slow means the wine is bad. Try them! It’s almost always better than waiting in line for whatever thing is situationally culty in the room you’re in.

Take breaks instead of leaving. If you start to feel overwhelmed, or saturated, or like your attention is wandering and you can’t focus on the wine in front of you — this often happens to me in under an hour — my advice is to take a little break instead of leaving. The form that this break takes is context dependent. In Maine, it was a lawn outside of the barn, and you could look at the water and say hi to the cows. But whether it’s a little fresh air or a quiet courtyard or whatever, it’s ok to tap out for a moment, have a bite to eat, listen to birds, etc, and then make a plan for what you want to taste next. Speaking of which —

Give yourself quests. You’re probably not going to taste everything in the room. Some things are going to be random chance — remember, you’re stopping at that empty table just to see. But it can be nice to give yourself little side quests.

These will depend on your interests, and on the focus of the fair you’re going to, of course. Maybe it’s as simple as tasting ten new grape varieties, or all of the chenins you can find, or paying more attention to Italy, or trying to collect all of the co-ferments in the room. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be too fussy or strict. It’s just about reflecting on what you’re actually curious about and letting that drive your decision-making.

Ask some questions. This can be intimidating and it’s not always possible, especially if there’s a language barrier or it’s very busy at the table, but all I can say is, if you can figure out what a producer really cares about, what they think is important to get right and what they spend time obsessing over, it’s really interesting to hear them talk about it. (This does assume that the person pouring the thing you’re tasting is the person who made it, which it should be said is not always the case! Other people potentially pouring for you include sales reps, festival volunteers, the teenage children of the producer, friends who need something to do at wine fairs to feel useful, importer portfolio managers, etc.)

Connect! One thing that took me a long time to realize is that most producers have almost no idea what happens to their wine once it leaves the winery, especially in the export market. Fairs are intense, and usually involve a lot of travel on either end, market visits, pop ups, a wall to wall schedule with an importer or a distributor partner, not to mention a multihour day pouring wines behind a table. This means that if a grower doesn’t want to have a deep, searching conversation with you, my advice is not to take it personally.

But in the same vein, it’s good to remember that these are human beings who are watching a year of their life being spit into a bucket in front of them, and sometimes they appreciate you sharing that you’ve connected with their wine. Again, this is very situational (and see above — the person pouring is not always the person who made the wine) but it is the special sauce of any wine fair, the chance to connect to practitioners who are farming and making this stuff and get to know their work.

So beyond the workshop that provided my excuse to take a six hour bus north, what were some other highlights of the weekend?

all of the apple wine Maine Wild Wine Fest is serving a lot of different people audience-wise. For many locals attending, it’s an opportunity to taste distributor tables pouring a big smorgasbord of different natural wine portfolios. The juice for me, however, is all in the domestic producers. (I can get international natural wine distribution at home.)

This trip, I was particularly struck by all of apple wine I was tasting, and how fucking good it was. From Left Bank and the multi-fruit things Sam Rogers was pouring from Rose Hill in the Hudson Valley to Maine folks like Rocky Ground and Cornish (who was showing single-tree ciders — very cool and a great example of something you can’t do with grape wine), the room was full of fermented apples, and apples co-fermented with other things, and as usual I had cause to reflect on how I probably don’t drink enough of this for how much I enjoy it and how well-suited it is to our region and how much it hits me right in my western Michigan–raised feels.

I learned that Maine will buy cider (which, I’m happy to hear it — cider needs all the help it can get) — but also that Maine is culturally very loyal to the concept of things being made in-state, and anything across a border in Vermont or New York has a much harder time finding traction.

(Unsolicited advice for NYC wine buyers who might be subscribed to this newsletter: if you have a tap line at your wine bar and want to pour cider you should be doing it out of keg to save waste and keep things fresh, and it should be local farmhouse in a 5oz BTG pour in a wine glass, and probably it should be something like Rose Hill, which is self-distributed and is not going to show up on your Provi search.)

If I had to pick a standout from what I tasted, it’d be the “Cindarella’s Slipper” from Eden in Champlain Valley, Vermont — a kaleidoscope orchard blend of (checks notes) everything from Muscadet de Dieppe and Bulmer’s Norman to sweets like Blue Pearmain and Grimes Golden, with some oldschool New York cider varieties more familiar to me, Esopus Spitzerberg and Rhode Island Greening and Ashmead’s Kernel and the like.

Native yeast fermentation + aged on gross lees with no racking for (if I remember correctly?) two winters until it settles clear, a magical combination that results in purity + reduction + texture that puts it in conversation with Richard Leroy’s Anjou chenin and Nanclares albariño and Hofgut Falkenstein riesling.

(It’s zero-zero, too. It’s also cider so it’s…$25/bottle?)

(The website where I double-checked this information displays a prominent “Rate Beer Style Score” of 98/100, which in a nutshell really tells you about some of the issues of comprehension and category cider faces.)

industry tasting group at Maine & Loire

Maine & Loire is a great wine shop on Washington Ave (and occasional wine bar — at the very least, you can crush a bottle early in the afternoon before walking across the street to Izakaya Minoto and/or oogling impossibly sharp knives at Strata and/or have beer and wedding cake at Night Mares, etc, all of which I did at one point or another that weekend). It’s on a good street.

Pete & Orenda, who own & operate the shop, were among this project’s first supporters outside the city, just as the pandemic began and all I could hear out of my window in Brooklyn was birdsong and sirens.

They have a bunch of early map prints of mine on the walls right next to a lectern displaying an open copy of Pascaline’s Thousand Vines. They were kind enough to let me host a Sunday–afternoon industry tasting group the day after the festival.

Here’s a play-at-home version of what we tasted. See if you can make some educated guesses based on a few true things about each wine, and keep scrolling for the reveal:

A–C 🌊🏞️🐚
three white wines each converging on a salty–savory textural target, but starting out from different climates / winemaking strategies / raw material:

A🌊 ocean-influenced, cool, high acid, in a poor region whose wines have historically been cheap + marginal, richness traditionally found via extended lees aging

B. 🏞️ complicated climate, mountainous, humid + extreme swings of cold and heat, a high-acid variety on its own roots, this producer also employs a lot of marginal climate winemaking — multivintage blending, lees aging, sparkling — for resiliency. richness coming here from long aging (4+ years before bottling) and lees

C. 🐚 oceanic, hot, hard white chalk, single-vintage single-vineyard, texture and salinity coming from a delicate veil of living yeast that develops over six months or so

D–F ⛱️🦪🌋
three wines made from the same white grape from different places, on different soils, with a diversity of stylistic expression:

⛱️ deep sand, breeze from nearby water moderates the heat, in a region where this high-acid variety was often pushed to overproduce and spruce up bulk blends

🦪 soft limestone w/ natural caverns, malo sometimes does not occur naturally, across the river from a much larger and more prestigious wine producing area, wines from here often bottled with a kiss of sweetness

🌋 hard blue-black metorphic rock, faster / hotter fermentations, more ripeness and often seesawing between reductive smokiness and bruised, nutty oxidation, sense of bitterness verging on tannic, white wine for red wine lovers

I’ll give you a second (and a photo buffer) if you’d like to play along and take a crack at these.

Ready for the answers?

Ok:

A🌊 LAVIE "Close de la Camerais"
melon b. in Pay Nantais, lees aging, zero sulfur

B. 🏞️ PLEB "Tête" 2018
Appalachian seyval blanc, free run juice, four years of aging before bottling, classical poise — I drank a bottle of 2017 Tissot "Mailloche" last week that reminded me a lot of this 💚

C. 🐚 RAMIRO IBAÑEZ "Miraflores" 2022
palomino in sherry country — single site, single vintage, unfortified, under a delicate veil of yeast for 6 mo or so before bottling (NOTE the back vintage 👀)

D–F ⛱️🦪🌋
three wines made from the same white grape from different places, on different soils, with a diversity of stylistic expression:

—> yep folks it's #chenincheninchenin 💚💚💚

⛱️ MARGINS, "Wilson Vineyard"
Clarksburg! Deep sand, Delta breeze. From Megan Bell, the first vineyard she worked with and one she helped push to working organically

🦪 GRANGE TIPHAINE, "Clef de Sol"
Montlouis! Soft yellowish tuffeaux limestone, caves, a small community of forward-thinking growers, across the river from the looming shadow of Vouvray

🌋 BEN COURAULT, "Gilbourg"
Anjou! The Layon, to be precise— a long, gentle southwest slope backed by forest, overlooking a tributary of the Loire once famous for dessert wines and now, for two decades, a nexus for the French natural wine movement + dry chenin on schist

It was a special and somewhat melancholy thing to share, too, with both of the American wines I opened being from wineries that no longer make wine. What can you do except celebrate what was there, share it, make sure you’re getting the story straight?

drink wine on a beach

Other Maine recs: a midday meal in with beautiful baked goods and white wine on tap at Luncheonette, pizza and natural wine at Friends & Family, it’s ok if dinner is just a hot dog while you drink really good cocktails at Room for Improvement

My last piece of advice is to find some water and drink a bottle of wine while looking at it.

In this case: pais vines growing wild up pink peppercorn trees in Bolivia at almost 8,000 feet elevation, fermented in clay tinajas and bottled without sulfur, perfumed and silky and shared by a very not-online wine industry friend.

Just looking at it makes summer feel a little closer. Talk soon.

<3,
grape kid