Off the Beaten Path #2

This is the second stop on my tour took me to the tiny Iowa town of Selma.  And it is small.  I honestly believe that there may be more different types of wine at this winery then there are people in the town.

Crane Winery, specializes in wines, "that grandpa used to make."  After visiting the winery I got the sense that Grandpa was a renegade fermenter.  The kind of man who separates the world into two groups, fermentable and fermentable with some added effort.  In other words, a man after my own heart.  It seems that wines are a kind of ongoing experiment.  At one point I asked the owner who was pouring me samples of wine if one of them was a blend. She smiled and shook her head, "Nope.  I there are no blends here.  If I blended wine, then I would have to remember what I did."  Grandpa would be proud.

So there is quite the selection here, and I'm not about to cover them all.  I don't think I even want to cover all the wines that I sampled.  Suffice to say that most of them tasted about how you would expect.  They were sweet with the heavy fruit flavors of whatever happened to be in the fermenter at the time.  For the most part, they were sweet but not overly-syrupy.  I'm not a fan of the sweeter wines, but most of these were pretty good.

Wickfields Whisper: A dry Norton like the one I found at Whispering Pines. This one was a whole lot better, though.  I'm not sure if it just had more time in the bottle, but the unique character of the Norton grape really came out in this one.  Earthy sweet caramel aroma.  The flavor is woody with cherry and blackberry fruit.  For those that like their wine sweet they have the Lockhouse, which is the same wine with residual sugars that clear the highest bar in street shoes.

Piestegal: Is a German-American word that evolved out of the Amanda colonies in Eastern Iowa for the Rhubarb plant. It comes from the English 'pie' and the German 'stengel' or stalk.  Piestengal is a Rhubarb wine that comes out of a long German heritage in the area.  This particular example had quite a kick to it.  There was a heavy alcohol flavor marking this wine as drink that would render a man horizontal after a couple glasses.  It poured almost clear and had some light tart and earthy flavors.  I'm still not sure whether I liked this or not and I think I would have been unconscious before I figured it out.

Restless Summer: Strawberry wine.  I don't think I have ever had a wine this sweet in my life.  Even the strange alcoholic Kool-Aid hell brews my fiance insists on bringing home have nothing on the residual sugars of this.  More functional as an ice-cream topping than as a drinking wine.   I mention it here because I'm interested to find out what fans of incredibly sweet wine think of this.

Chocolate Covered Cherry: Exactly what it sounds like, a cherry wine with cocoa added.  The cherry flavor hits right off the top, but it slowly melts away leaving a bitter, unsweetened chocolate flavor lingering in the back of the palate. Fun if only for the sheer novelty.