A few weeks ago I had a wonderful experience while visiting wineries in Oregon’s Willamette valley and while they were all good, the folks at Anne Amie provided a unique and special experience for me. I joined Thomas Houseman, Winemaker along with Andy Gribskov and Tammie Crawford both assistant winemakers in a tasting for some of their upcoming releases. Not knowing what to expect, I sat down to 7 glasses of an unlabeled white wine. Prior to tasting, I was told these were a fortified wine which was to be the next release, the 2009 Amie, which is a Late Harvest Muller-Thurgau wine. Also know as “Stickes”, this would be classified as a dessert wine. The Muller-Thurgau varietal is used in some of the other wines made by Anne Amie and could be described as similar to Sauvignon Blanc without the grapefruit flavors.
The tasting wasn’t meant to be challenging. Thomas asked me to indicate which were my favorite 2 glasses out of the 7 and then 2 favorites from the next 6 glasses. In short, each of the samples held a slightly different percentage of alcohol produced from fortifying the wine with Brandy, thus giving each of the samplings a slightly different taste. The goal was to sample 13 glasses in total, narrow the picks down to 4, which will be tasted later for the final decision. I was happy to know that of my picks, I had 3 of the 4 as my favs.
The last tasting we did was for the next release of their Rubies, which is a red blend of Cabernet, Syrah and Merlot, also fortified and a dessert wine as well. With this tasting we had 6 glasses and I’m happy to share that 1 of my 2 favorites will be the new release. It was unanimous for which sample we all liked. For aromas, the Rubies samples I tried had hints of blackberries and cherries followed by little spice. It’s slightly sweet tasting with dark berry flavors as well. As the tasting notes say from the 2008 release, this is a dangerously perfect match to chocolate.
I know it may sound weird to those of you who have done tastings before but to be invited to sample the future of a wine is a great honor and I owe Thomas and his entire staff a big thank you for including me.
’09 Muller-Thurgau (close to a Sav. Blanc w/out the grapefruit flavors)
’09 Pinot Gris (citrus w/ hint of spice)
’07 Willamette pinot Noir (hint of spice on the nose, very smooth tasting and 22% new oak).
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