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Fred Merwath of Standing Stone believes Saperavi is suitable for rosé, sparkling wine, varietal bottles, and blends.
Standing Stone started with a single acre of Saperavi in 1994 but now has more than seven acres of the grape.
Fred Frank held a successful Saperavi festival at Dr. Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in May, highlighting Georgian wines.
The Saperavi grape from Georgia was one of the Old-World varieties brought to the Finger Lakes by Konstantin Frank in the 1950s.
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Fred Merwath of Standing Stone believes Saperavi is suitable for rosé, sparkling wine, varietal bottles, and blends.
Standing Stone started with a single acre of Saperavi in 1994 but now has more than seven acres of the grape.
Fred Frank held a successful Saperavi festival at Dr. Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars in May, highlighting Georgian wines.
The Saperavi grape from Georgia was one of the Old-World varieties brought to the Finger Lakes by Konstantin Frank in the 1950s.
In 1994 Marti and Tom Macinski, owners of Standing Stone Vineyards, planted an acre of Saperavi grapes. Two other winemakers in the Finger Lakes—McGregor Vineyard and Dr. Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars—also had this ancient variety from the Republic of Georgia in the ground. Until 2011, no one was allowed to put the name “Saperavi” on a bottle because the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) did not recognize it as a wine-making grape. This is ironic because archaeological evidence shows that the Georgians have been making wine in the Caucasus Mountains for 8,000 years.
On May 12, 2022, Dr. Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars held its first Saperavi festival. It was, said owner Fred Frank, a tremendous success. About 300 people tasted both Saperavi and Rkatsiteli, the most popular red and white wines, respectively, from Georgia. In addition to the host vineyard’s wine, visitors were able to taste several wines imported from the small republic east of the Black Sea and north of Armenia.
Konstantin Frank, who was a professor at the polytechnic university in Odessa, Ukraine, brought Saperavi and 59 other grape varieties over to the Finger Lakes in the 1950s. Like other Old-World wine-producing varieties, it is derived from Vitis vinifera. While Konstantin was an academic, his son Willy was a businessman. “When he took over in 1984,” said Willy’s son Fred, “he began to run it as more of a business and less as an experiment.” Willy Frank whittled down the list of wines made to more proven varieties. Saperavi took a back seat.
It is a teinturier variety, which means that both the skin and the pulp are red. “We don’t need to soak it on the skins as long,” Frank said. “Most wines get more tannic while the color leaches from the skins during maceration.” Maceration is the part of the winemaking process during which tannins, color, and flavor leach into the must, the mixture of pulp and juice in the tank. In most grape varieties the juice is grayish or clear, but with teinturier grapes it is red from the start.
Saperavi’s shorter maceration is an advantage in the East, Frank said, where grapes may not ripen fully before harvest. Saperavi is not especially winter-hardy, less so than Cabernet Franc or Lemberger (Blaufränkisch) but more so than Pinot Noir. The bunches are very loose and it is, according to Frank, less prone to rot (until it isn’t, as we shall see).
Frank praised the deep red color of Saperavi and described the flavor profile as “all across the board,” changing greatly with growing conditions. Dr. Frank Vinifera Wine Cellars grows this grape near Keuka Lake in a site that is steep and stony with shaley, acidic soils. In 2007 they planted Saperavi in the Hector “banana belt.”
“The water in Seneca Lake is 600 feet deep, which moderates the winter temperatures,” Frank said. “The vineyard there has deep, loamy soils that are more basic, less steep, and less rocky.” The Dr. Frank Saperavi wine is a blend of grapes from these two locations.
“It is fermented in steel with an open top,” he said, “and manually punched down.” This latter process breaks the skins. “Then we move it into French oak barrels for a second malo-lactic fermentation.” The conversion from malic to lactic acid creates wine with a rounder, fuller mouthfeel. After the second fermentation it is kept in new French oak barrels for about a year before bottling.
Dr. Frank produces between 500 and 750 cases of Saperavi per year, and every year they are planting more vines of this variety. In the early 1960s, during Konstantin’s time, production was more limited and sporadic. Fred Frank worked with his grandfather during high school and college. Although he studied business at Cornell, he worked in the wine industry for many years afterward. After he succeeded his father as president of the winery in 1993, he began to blend the philosophies of the previous two generations, an approach continued by his daughter Megan, who has graduate degrees in both business and the science of wine. Saperavi is again on the shelves.
The popularity of this Georgian grape took off about nine years ago, according to Fred Frank. “You need multiple makers to popularize a wine,” he said. “Saperavi is one of the up and comers. The next big buzz is going to be sparkling wine.”
Which is interesting because that is one of the things that Fred Merwarth makes with it. Oskar Bynke, Merwarth, and his wife Maressa own Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyard in Dundee, which in 2017 acquired Standing Stone Vineyards in Hector, along with what had expanded to 8.5 acres of Saperavi grapes.
Merwarth had no prior experience with Saperavi and, he said, Standing Stone really didn’t either. By 2017 the Macinskis had only made a couple of barrels of wine because only an acre was producing grapes. However, they planted over seven acres after 2014, and by 2021 all of these vines were producing.
It is in a single block that extends from the Seneca Lake shore eastward up the hill. Merwarth, who is also the vineyard manager, noted there are interesting undulations in the block. The rows run north-south, divided by an east-west road. North of the road the vines are bigger with higher production. These are berries he uses for sparkling wine and rosé.
South of the road the vines are smaller, produce less and are used to make red wine. “We tackled it in a systematic way,” Merwarth said of making Saperavi wines. They begin by selecting grapes from several different places in the block in order to eventually blend them. All their grapes are hand-picked.
He, winemaker Dillon Buckley, and assistant winemaker Bryanna Cramer focused on rosé first. “We picked early and it had screaming acid,” Merwarth said. They put whole clusters in the tank and pumped over the juice instead of punching down. They made it in steel, wood, and stone tanks and blended the results. “The stone was interesting,” Merwarth said. “It rounded out the fruits.” They add Gewurztraminer—up 5-6%—in order to lighten the rosé and round out the taste.
Merwarth said the acidity of Saperavi is perfect for sparkling wine. “We stop the cuvée [juice extraction] at 30%, so Saperavi doesn’t yield a lot,” he said. “We usually go to 70% with other grapes.”
While they produced and sold rosé and sparkling Saperavi, they continued to search for the best way to produce a red varietal bottle. “We were surprised by the lack of tannins,” Merwarth said. “So, we started adding whole clusters and doing pour overs.” They focused on getting enough heat from the fermentations. “We found that it lacked a mid-palate structure; the flavor is up front and then drops off.” The acid level was high—12-13 grams per liter—even when the grapes were very ripe when picked.
“We have a philosophy of not adjusting the wine,” Merwarth said, “so we had to adjust the process of making it.” For example, by varying factors in malo-lactic fermentation they could reduce acidity.
He gave a lot of credit to his winemakers, Dillon and Bryanna, who are both intrigued by this exotic grape and have pushed ahead with the experimentation in the winemaking process. Their plan for the coming harvest is to try carbonic maceration, a process used to make Beaujolais. This method uses a closed-tank to create a carbon dioxide-rich environment. Fermentation takes place inside the grape while it is still whole and uncrushed.
Saperavi is quite versatile. In addition to being suitable for rosé, sparkling wine, and varietal bottles, it can also be blended. While the Macinskis original plan to combine with Pinot Noir was unsuccessful, Merwarth has liked blends with Petit Verdot and Cabernet Sauvignon.
While the winemakers adjusted the production process, Merwarth also followed a learning curve in the vineyard. “When it’s done, it is really done,” he said of Saperavi ripening behavior. “You have to pick it right away.” The clusters, he said, are big and heavy and when Botrytis fungus (“noble rot”) appeared, it did so in a unique way. Instead of developing spots where adjacent berries touch, in this loose-clustered variety the whole berry gets infected.
Saperavi grapes are generally ripe by the middle of October. At Labor Day they were a dark color but were not “filled out.” As they ripen, Merwarth said, the berries actually droop on the cluster, which is unusual.
He has planted Saperavi on the west side of Seneca Lake at the Wiemer vineyard. He noticed two forms in the Standing Stones grapes; the older plants have round berries, but the younger ones produce oval ones. He planted both in Dundee.
Fred Frank noted that the flavor of Saperavi varied greatly, depending on the conditions where it was grown. Fred Merwarth contacted Saperavi expert and wine importer Lisa Granik, who brought him several bottles, all from Georgia. She and Merwarth sat down and tasted them. “Normally,” he said with wonder in his voice, “after you taste several bottles of say, Cab Franc, you can say, ‘Ok, that’s from the Loire, that’s from Bordeaux, that’s from Friuli,’ but not Saperavi. Lisa brought 40 bottles and they were all different.”
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