They're Raw! Barrel and Tank Samples from Hosmer Winery, New York

365 Days

They're Raw! Barrel and Tank Samples from Hosmer Winery, New York

Posted 04/26/2008 at 04:00 PM by Cathy

Here's what I love about tasting wines straight from the barrel or tank: they're raw.

Raw, as in unfiltered. Raw, as in no make up. Raw, as in young and full of promise and brash and honest. Wines that are raw don't have many places to hide.

So when Maren Hosmer lined up several barrel and tank samples at a tasting today – right alongside finished wines from Hosmer Winery in upstate, New York – I thanked my lucky stars. And I thanked Maren Hosmer herself for being thoughtful and brave enough to bring samples of both her award-winning wines and her untested, unfiltered, un-known tank and barrel samples.

Upstate New York has a well-earned reputation for Rieslings, but the most artistic and most interesting wines I tried today were the 2006 Chardonnay – because it was light on the oak and heavy on the nuance – and the 2007 unfiltered Pinot Gris tank sample.

I fall pretty easily for aromatic whites under the best of circumstances, but give me a Pinot Gris (from a tank sample!) whose aromas were already wafting seductively toward my nose, and I'm smitten.

Wine consumers don't exactly trip over any deluge of New York state wines here in Boston but the 2007 Hosmer Pinot Gris, once it's released, is one that track down, rain or shine.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.