Rocket Trombone

Hooray for tasty local wine! After missing it for the past several years, Shelley and I were finally able to attend the Maryland Wine Festival last weekend in Westminster, with our friends Dana and Matt. I know that in past years, the admission fee got you a strip of tickets for wine tastings, and you had to buy more tickets if you ran out (or stop drinking). This year, they changed to allowing unlimited tastings, which I think is great. We’ve been to a festival before where you were given a set number of tastings, and it’s very difficult because you want to try new things, but you don’t want to waste a ticket on something you might not like. In that case, we ended up drinking Rieslings all day because that was our favorite wine at the time. Don’t get me wrong, Rieslings are great, but they start to taste the same after a while. So as long as you keep the inevitable drive home in mind (and there are PLENTY of police around, offering free breathalyzer tests, to make sure that you do), I’m all for unlimited tastings. The samples may have been smaller as a result, but you could try anything and everything you wanted without worrying if it was worth it. If you didn’t like it, you could toss it and move on.

As expected, we had some very good wine and some that was not-so-good. I think my favorite winery was Elk Run Vineyards. I tried every wine they had to offer (except the three you had to pay $1 to taste), and liked all of them. We were very impressed with their Viognier and bought a bottle for home. Sorry Virginia wineries, it was far better than any of the Viogniers you were so eager to sell me last summer, but I still love you for your Chardonnay, so I’ll be back.

We skipped Linganore, Boordy, and Woodhall, since we’ve been to those wineries and are already pretty familiar with their wine. Black Ankle Vineyards had good wine, and I was particularly fond of their Crumbling Rock red, which won the Governor’s Cup, but at $48 for a bottle, it was rather overpriced. Fiore Winery was also one of our favorites.

Dove Valley had baskets of grapes there for you to taste along with their wines. I’d never eaten wine grapes before, they’re smaller than “regular” grapes and are very juicy and sweet, which makes sense, that’s why they’re good for making wine. It was really neat to be able to have a grape and then try the wine that was made from it.

Other good wines were found at Bordeleau, Cove Point, Cygnus, Fridays Creek, Loew, Penn Oaks and St. Michaels, but since I wasn’t taking notes, I unfortunately don’t have much to say other than remembering that I liked some of their wines. In general, whites were better than reds. Many of the reds didn’t have as full of a flavor as I’ve had from other parts of the world, and were over-oaked to compensate for it.

Among the not-so-good wines were Frederick Cellars and Terrapin Station Winery. The wine at Frederick was extremely acidic, which completely overwhelmed any of the flavor of the grapes. We were excited about Terrapin Station, due to the name, but their wine came in a box and was rather disappointing. I’m not sure if the packaging contributed to it or not, but something just didn’t taste right. I felt bad not liking something that took as much effort to make as wine does, so I hope that they can improve in future harvests and be successful.

The rest of the festival was fun too, though we really didn’t check out much of the non-wine vendors. The music was good. I especially liked the big band jazz provided by Blue Caliente. I had played a lot of the songs in the 5:30 band at Maryland, and was happy to hear them again. At one point, Matt and I were entranced by a sign which read “Deep Fried Cheesecake”, wondering how such a thing could be. We were well rewarded for our curiosity, it was fantastic stuff. We also got to do some quality catching-up with Dana and Matt while decimating a tub of hummus and some pasta salad. Good times for sure, I hope we get to go again!