"Blind" tasting

Photo: Melody Flammger
Butterfly Wine by Lucas Vineyards

Most blind tastings are done without the tasters knowing anything about the wine.  When doing a blind tasting, the administrator will even cover the bottles of wine with a paper bag so that nothing is known about them.  The goal of the blind tasting is to be able to guess the grape type the wine was made from without knowing very much about the wine- as little as possible in fact.  Without some serious administrative help, most of us are unable to do completely blind tastings, but now and again we come across a wine and think "Now, what in the world could this wine be?"  

This is because many wineries have taken to a minimalistic approach in their labeling.  This makes the wines look attractive and/or unique but presents a problem to the already overwhelmed wine consumer.  Many times I’ll pick up a wine bottle in the store and scan the bottle looking for some kind of a description or an idea of what grapes were used, etc.  Sometimes I’ll find a satisfactory answer by looking around but sometimes I won’t.  In these cases, I have to either pick up the bottle and take the risk of not liking it when I open it up or put it back down and go for a wine that tells me a little more about itself.

Luckily, I can usually guess pretty well by the descriptors on the bottle if the wine is going to appeal to me or not.  I can imagine if this isn’t the case for everyone, especially those who don’t know what they’re looking for in a wine.  That said, this time I did pick up a bottle that I was drawn to by the label and decided to try it.  The wine doesn’t tell you a whole lot up front.  The name is a bit ambiguous “Butterfly” and the winery, Lucas Vineyards is in New York.  I’ve never had any of their wines before so I decided it would be a good opportunity to try my skills.

As always, I start with my 4 S’s (See Better wine tasting for more on these).

Photo: Melody Flammger
Glass of the "Butterfly" wine by Lucas Vineyards

See and Swirl:

The color on this wine is very clear with no discernible legs on it.  I can interpret these findings as that the wine is likely unoaked and relatively low in alcohol content. The wine is probably a young white wine.

Smell:

Lemon and green apple come to the forefront of the nose on this wine with a hint of a floral aroma.  Using quick, short sniffs I can also detect a hint of honey on the nose.

Sip:

The green apple flavor hits the tongue first, followed by the floral taste as well finishing with a honey aftertaste.  The wine is both zingy and sweet.  The zinginess  is likely caused by a high acidity in the wine and the sweetness is a moderate amount of residual sugar in the wine. 

Given what I know about the wine so far, I can almost conclusively rule out vinifera grapes.  First, most wineries in the U.S. will advertise these vinifera grapes in order to sell the wine more easily and for a higher price because these grapes are considered to be noble.  The vinifera grapes I am ruling out are: Chardonnay, Riesling, and Sauvignon Blanc.  This means that the wine was likely made from labrusca grapes (native grapes).  There are many different varieties of labrusca grapes including: Delaware, Golden Muscat, Ontario, Seneca, Cauyuga and many others.

 Because many wineries in New York use different labrusca grapes based on their locations and even blend the grapes to balance out their wines, it is possible that without writing the winemaker themselves we may never know the grape that was used to make the wine.  Thus, I suppose in this blind tasting I have failed to identify the grape that was used but was still able to determine quite a bit about the wine just from what I could discern.  We all get better at these sorts of exercises with practice- and next time I’ll use a European wine so that there are a finite number of possibilities.  I certainly enjoyed the adventure and this wine was a winner in my book.

As always, continue to explore and don’t be afraid to try this experiment yourself.  You may surprised at what you know!