So, do they? It isn’t listed on the ingredients, yet their reputation for sweetness (and their actual sweetness, in my limited experience,) might belie a naive reading of the ingredient list. IME they have the best actual flavor of any wine except for the sweetness.
If some do, how does one tell if the wine has added sugar?
Are there any Concord Wines that are not dessert-quality wines, both in agedness and sweetness? Can you point me to some? Are there wine blends that mix a sort of Beaujolais Nouveau sweet/early wine with the awesome flavor of Concord Grapes?
Concord grapes are pretty sweet naturally (although I find I usually have to add sugar when making my grape pies), and I seriously doubt that they need to have sugar added. Wines made from Concord (and other related grapes, like Catawba and Diamond) are both pretty sweet and pretty “foxy” – they have a characteriastic American Grape earthy taste that is absebnt from European grapes. It’sd prettyy hard to describe flavors, especially over the Internet. But you know how seedless California graoes taste? You know how Welch’s Grape Jelly or Grape juice tastes? The difference between those tastes is the foxiness. It’s anathemas to traditional wine drinkers.
I love it. I get Widmer’s Lake Niagara all the time. My wife thinks I’m nuts. (As I’ve said many times before on the Board, I think it’s a step up from Mogen David or Manischevitz, which really are sweet). My claim is that it’s very fruity and foxy, but not really sweet.
In any event, you can make wine from Concord and related grapes that isn’t what real wine drinkers would call cloyingly sweet. But it’s not so easy to find. I believe that Bully Hill makes some, but it’s hard to get their wine away from the New York-New England region, and you can only get a fraction of their total range outside their own store (I know – I just talked to a wine store about this two days ago). In any event, the folks at Bully Hill claim they only use New York Grapes in their wines, and none of theirs are really “sweet”. Many of them are quite dry. If you get a chance to visit their vineyards in Hammondport, N.y., do so and taste their vintages.
Thanks: if my brother ever drags me along on another New York Winery tour I’ll insist on going there: it must have been about the only winery in that region we didn’t hit.
I grew up on Concord grapes myself up in upstate NY, but like you said it’s difficult to talk intelligently if you don’t know the lingo. I hate California seedless grapes with a passion due to their lack of flavor, but because of this lack of “bite” I subjectively rate them as sweeter than Concords. Perhaps I’ve never tasted California wine grapes: how do they taste fresh versus Concords and seedless table grapes?
I guess what I’m saying is that i’m surprised that the “foxiness” as you describe does not translate as powerfully to the flavor of the wine as the sweetness does: the end result tastes pretty close to the original grape, only sweeter and less tangy. It’s surprising to me because considering its been fermented I’d expect it to taste less sweet, not more, which is why I wondered about added sugar.
I’ll try Widmer’s Lake niagara if I can find it, too: the only Concord I’ve tasted is M-D, so maybe that flavors my rating of them as well.
Foxinmess definitely translates into the wine – in fact, I understand it even translated into European vinifera wines after they werre grafted onto American Labrusca roots followingh the Phylloxera debacle, and esteem for American vintages plummeted. It’s come back since, especially with the rise of the California wines. But Widmer’s definitely has foxiness. If you really want to taste it, get wine made from the “Diamond” grape. There used to be a winery that made this – Chateau Esperanza, but they’re long gone.
By the way, if you can’t find Widmers’ (difficult outside the northeast), you can get a pretty similar experience from Taylor wines, which are much more widely available – I’ve found them as far afield as Wyoming (the state, not the town).
Concord grapes are just naturally very sweet. Since their main use is for grape juice, this makes sense. Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast fermentation, and yeast, if left in its own waste (essentially) will die when that waste reaches a certain level. Some yeasts are more tolerant than others, so depending on what kind of yeast you use, you will get different levels of alcohol content and will have residual sugar if the sugar content exceeds the yeast’s alcohol tolerance. I’d bet between the types of yeast used for fermentation and the natural sugar content of Concord grapes, you are going to pretty much end up with a more or less sweet wine.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had fresh Concord grapes, but their flavor is so strong that I just can’t stand to eat them straight up. And the skins are quite tough, as well. Fresh varietal grapes that are grown for wine-making purposes also tend to also be strongly flavored and have thick skins, but they are less sweet (though with some white wine varietals, they can get quite sweet if you let them get really really ripe) and they don’t have that ‘foxy’ flavor that CalMeacham talks about. I really wish there was a better way to describe it - I think of it as more of a rough or unrefined flavor, but that’s pretty useless as a descriptor too.
You might want to try a wine made from the Delaware grape - that’s a semi-dry varietal that originated in North America as well and is related to Concord and Catawba. Cal says he likes the foxiness, but lots of folks don’t and the Delaware grape has the least foxiness of the three varieties and produces a more delicate wine. I don’t know if FL allows you to ship wine to your house, but one winery I can recommend is Chalet Debonne. Grand River Cellars, unfortunately, doesn’t sell their wines online, but they have some good ones. I paid a visit to the farmer that started that business long ago, and he knew his stuff. If you ever have the urge to visit the northeastern Ohio boonies :p, that’ s the place to go for wine. I personally really dislike sweet wines, but the Ohio wineries do a good business in them along with other, less sweet varietals and blends.
i grew up eating Concord grapes, sometimes without, sometimes with skins. To me, that foxiness and tough-skin is standard “grape”, and other grapes are anemic and thin-skinned by comparison. No joke. My grandmother used to have an arbor in her backyard, and compensation for having to go back to school was that those grapes were ripe. We used to have an arbor at m,y parents’ house as well, but that’s gone now. You can get concord grapes at some local Boston supermarkets and roadside stands, but it’s a narrow window of opportunity. I always have to be quick to get enough for my annual grape pie baking.
They might. It might depend on where the wine is made. In California for example, chaptalization is illegal (although the addition of grape juice concentrate is not, and is sort of a work around). But in New York, where I suspect miuch commercial Concord wine is grown and produced, it is perfectly legal. I don’t know if there is an easy way for you to know if the wine has been chaptalized. Typically in a lab you can confirm suspicions of chaptalization by breaking down the wine. I think a higher presence of sucrose is usually a sign. And like others said, Concord grapes are just naturally sweet and foxy, I doubt the addition of sugar is even needed.
The easiest way for me to describe foxiness is the taste of Welch’s grape juice, just as Cal stated.
I just ate a few Cab Sauv grapes on Wednesday, and have enjoyed many vinifera varietals ripe of the vine, both red and white, as they’re often brought into our break room this time of year. They are quite sweet, much sweeter than California table grapes, but not as sweet as Concord grapes (which I grew up eating of off vines in my neighbors back yard in NJ.)
Foxiness may carry over to the wines, but I’m not sure what this statement is supposed to mean. If you’re implying that most California wines made from vinifera varietals are grafted onto labrusca rootstock, I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree. I believe most of the commercial rootstocks used today are v. rupestris, v. riparia, v. berlandieri, and hybrids of those, such as the infamous AxR1 (which is still being uprooted today.)
The quote from me says nothing about foxiness – it’s related to the rise in prestige of American wines with the surgence of the California wineries.
I know that they did at one time graft the vinifera vines onto labrusca roots to overcome phylloxera , and that it was claimed that the foxiness was detectable in the resulting wines. I don’t know if it’s true, since that was long before my time, and I never had any of those wines. In any event, whatever practices they use today don’t invalidate anything I’ve written.
You know what’s weird is that Welch’s grape juice tastes little like Concord grapes and Concord wine - they taste more similar to each other (they almost never sell Concords fresh down here – like Cal, a grape to me isnt a grape unless it has a tasty, tough skin.)
I’d guess that the skin provides much of the bitter/sour effect that the alcohol does in the wine (I don’t really like grape juice myself, despite coming from grape country.)
???
I’m puzzled – this doesn’t correlate with my experience. The grape juice tastes like both the grapes and the wine, in my experience. And my wife’s. Even MilliCal, having tasted a sip, said the wine tasted like grape juice that had gone bad.
Hmmm. I guess it’s possible that they’re more similar to each other than to anything else so can all be grouped together. It’s just that when I was growing up, they tasted dissimilar enough to each other that I grouped “Concord grapes” and “concord grape juice” as two separate “flavors” in my mind. With the wine coming somewhere in between: it’s possible that I wouldnt have classified them as such if I had been introduced to the wine earlier as it would “bridge the gap” so to speak. But not being a grape expert I can’t say how close the lot of them taste to anything else.
While we’re at it let me point you folks to Mt. Hope’s ¶ Concord wine. Excellent stuff. Sweet without being overwhelming and it’s got the just-right taste for me. I’ve got several bottles downstairs right now.
I bought a place recently with a couple of grape vines in the backyard and was extremely disappointed to discover that they were Concords :). My problem is less the foxiness than the gelatinous consistency of the center of those “slipskin” grapes. Feels like I’m chewing on fish eyes. I like my table grapes like I like my apples and in fact most fruits - crisp.
But I’ve never tried a Concord wine. Might be worth exploring - I do have an amateur winemaking friend.
I’ve got an arbor in my yard. It’s used more as a line-of-sight break between us & the neighbors, though, so it’s horribly overgrown and thus not producing fruit up to its potential. Ping me next year around the time they should be ripe & I’ll let you pick the whole thing. Well, almost the whole thing. I’ll eat some.
This is the first year we’ve lived here, so I didn’t get a chance to pick any this year, since they were past their prime by the time I thought about them, but the scent of them evokes some very strong memories from growing up. Some of them might be suitable for ice wine after a few more cold nights.
