I lost the picture of this bottle, so here is the 2004 vintage label. It was the same for the 2007 vintage.

Appellation: Lehigh Valley (Pennsylvania)
Grape: Chambourcin (pronounced sham-bor-SAN with that uppity French nasal “in” sound)
ABV: not determined (labeled “table wine”), but given Brix at harvest, I would guess around 13%
Price Point: $16
Closure: Natural cork

Technical Notes: {Brix} at harvest: 23.5-24. pH: 3.95, TA 6 g/L after malolactic fermentation and stabilization with potassium carbonate. Destemmed, pumped into bins and inoculated. Extended maceration (3 weeks) with punchdowns. 16 months in Hungarian oak. (Thanks to Pinnacle Ridge owner Brad Knapp for the detailed info!)

Hedonic Notes:
Pours a dark ruby red. Whoof, smoky oak on the nose. A little {heat}, with some raspberry fruit. There is just the slightest sulfur off-aroma on the nose, like opening a hard boiled egg. In the mouth, light and fruity if a bit thin, with slight {astringency}. It’s got a very short finish, but acidity lingers long after. When I approached this wine the second day, it was already badly {oxidized}, which I would attribute to some Acetobacter. The relatively high pH of this wine (close to 4) makes it susceptible to spoilage in the presence of oxygen.

Rating: 2 out of 5 corks .

Chambourcin is promoted highly on the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail as its signature grape. If you know the hybrids produced up in the Finger Lakes, then Chambourcin may not be as familiar as Cayuga White, Seyval, Foch and others. That’s because it’s not grown extensively in the Finger Lakes.

In terms of hybrids, Chambourcin is not well-suited for the Finger Lakes because it is relatively cold-tender, with tissue damage occuring anywhere from 0 F to -5 F (compare to DeChaunac’s -15F). Pennsylvania, especially the southeast corner, is warmer than New York, with fewer extremely cold days and more frost-free days, so it’s a bit of a safer environment for Chambourcin vines.

Chambourcin is one of few hybrid grapes that still exists in France, along with Baco Noir, Seyval Blanc, and a handful of others that survived the Order 66-like purge of American hybrids from France in the mid-20th century. It’s predominantly found in the Loire Valley, but you won’t find it in any of the top-quality AOC wines, at least not legally. It turns out that this grape is handy to have around, though, since it produces monoglucoside anthocyanins. Why is this important?

Example of a vinifera anthocyanin, with a sugar in the 3- position. Diglycosylated anthocyanins also have a sugar in the 5- position. Figure "borrowed" from G. Sacks, Cornell University.

Red hybrids are generally high in anthocyanins, the compounds that give red wine its color. Often, these have sugar groups conjugated to them to improve solubility. Many hybrid varieties add TWO sugar groups, creating diglycoside anthocyanins. Vinifera grapes only add one sugar, leading to monoglucoside anthocyanins. The test for mono vs. diglucoside anthocyanins is relatively simple (thin layer chromatography, or TLC) and can be used to determine if a wine has been “adulterated” with “inferior” hybrid grapes (e.g., unfit for AOC classification). However, since Chambourcin’s anthocyanins are monoglycosylated, they are difficult to distinguish from those of European vinifera grapes, at least at first pass. So, if you were a French winemaker and your wine needed a little color, for example…. ah, perhaps I have said too much.

Further Reading:
Wine Business Monthly overview of Chambourcin
Detailed info on Chambourcin from Iowa State
Article from the New York Cork Report on the connection between mono- and diglycosides and foxy aroma
Review of more-advanced wine adulteration analysis: García-Beneytez et al., “Analysis of Grape and Wine Anthocyanins by HPLC-MS”, J. Ag. Food Chem., 2003.

                          

The 5-pack. image from wine.woot

Notes:
Looks: The label. It is so purple!  And gold!  Plus, it looks like the Girl Scouts logo.  It probably doesn’t go too well with Thin Mints though.  Actually, maybe.  That might be interesting to try.

Copyright infringement? Encouraging girl scouts to drink wine?

As for the wine, a tinge of reddish orange is peeking through the normal deep purple of a young wine; it’s starting to show its age, but just slightly*.
Nose: Honestly, at my first sniff i got an interesting aroma: shellfish. like shrimp shells. Further down, i got sawdust, like a freshly cut 2×4. Eventually this led into some dark fruit, blueberryish characteristic cooked fruit zinfandel notes.
Palate: At first sip, I felt this in my cheeks. The {astringency} puckered them right up, an experience that I’ve rarely had in a non-experimental wine before. That being said, it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. I like a wine that firmly announces its presence in one’s mouth, like a medieval herald’s trumpet (you know, with the big banner on it). Dun da da DAH! WINE! It’s a bit woody, maybe owing to time spent in barrels, likely American oak.
It also had a hint of sweetness, which called me back to the fruit*. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has a bit of residual sugar. On the palate I was reminded of a wine I had a little while ago, Viña Borgia (garnacha). It had a tinge of bitterness to go along with the astringency, what one might call “oaky tannin“.
Rating: 2 corks

In contrast to the Long Point Zinfandel (grown somewhere in CA), this Zinfandel had a lot of acidity. The high acidity intensified the effect of the astringency, which was probably brought in by the Cabernet Sauvignon portion of this somewhat unusual red blend. All in all, it wasn’t that great. In fact, even for $8, you could probably do much better (think Chile).

Color changes in 1, 5, and 25 year-old wines. This is the only adequate picture of this phenomenon I could find, since all the wine journals seem to be printed in black and white. img adapted (read: stolen) from G. Sacks, Cornell Univ.

*Science! As red wines age, their color drifts from bluish-purple to brick-red to brown. Color in red wines come from contact of the juice with the grape skins. In the skins live compounds called anthocyanins. These polyphenolic compounds (or if you want to market a bit better, ANTIOXIDANTS) can be found in several different colors depending on the state of the wine (pH, oxidation, etc.) (Ref: Mirabel et al., “Copigmentation in model wine solutions: occurrence and relation to wine aging”, AJEV, 1999) As the wine ages, the reddish types begin to dominate over the purples. The rate at which this occurs can depend on the fermentation and storage conditions.

Once the wine starts turning brown, it’s oxidizing (more on oxidizing in a future post). For more info on color and wine, check out this page. While I kind of disagree with their statements about quality and age, it’s interesting to see a color spectrum for wines.