Tasting Notes

I think often we forget that wine is made from grapes when there’s an entire industry devoted to people rinsing the stuff like mouthwash whilst deciding what other, non-grapey flavors are grooving in the glass, from candied persimmon and meyer lemon curd to quince paste and dragon fruit nectar. Guilty as charged. But sometimes, a grape product just tastes like...grapes, and this ruby sparkling valdiguié from Las Jaras in collaboration with Martha Stoumen is an anatomically-perfect example of that. It has this almost syrup-like, dark concord stamp on the tongue that instantly time-warps me back to licking drippy purple twin pops as a kid on some stoop, slurping maniacally in a race against the hot Northeastern sun. This pét-nat is special because it tastes like not much more than a jug of Welch’s, and that’s very rad. Out of the way, adorable dimply commercial children from the ‘90’s who tried to convince us that grape juice is “too good to gulp.” It’s too good not to.