Wine and Apples

Yesterday I went to the Wine and Apple Festival at the Altamont Fairgrounds in Altamont NY. In addition to the wine tasting and buying there was a lot of apple (the round fruit) related stuff, both edible and items made from all things apple. There was the usual collection of craft vendors, spanning the spectrum from works of art and useful items like cutting boards to cheap crud to give as gifts to people you don't really care about. There was a lot of jewelry, spices, marinades, rubs, sauces, decorative dishes and platters on which to serve, and signs for your kitchen wall from funny and wise to trite and rude.

The only thing I can say about the wines is that if you think of NY City as "New York" you need to look at a map. Most of the state is farm country, horse breeding and training, huge dairies, vegetable farms, vineyards from Long Island to the Adirondack Mountains, hop farms, wineries, small cheese making operations, microbreweries, and two of the four major national brands of "Greek Style" yogurt. In short other than a few large cities an agricultural state, where lovers of locally made food and drink can choose from the offerings of hundreds of small craft producers who can compete only by the quality of their products.

Almost too much of a good thing
 
I went with my kids who share similar taste in wine to my own, which favors dry or semi-dry wines, will enjoy fairly sweet wines with tons of fruit flavor, and doesn't find overpowering oak character from barrel aging to be a substitute for the flavor of the grapes. With that in mind we quickly isolated a number of wines from grapes grown within 150 miles of Altamont, and bought our winter stash of wines. Not surprisingly we found that we had rather a lot of wine to take back with us, and regretted not bringing some means of transporting it more easily that carrying it. Next year we will bring a small cart to take back our haul, this year I prevailed on two maintenance guys in a golf cart to give the wine a ride to the gate while I trotted behind.

High and low points

The unexpected high point was finding a really hot hot sauce with pretty good flavor. Hot is easy, flavor is not. As always, due to the large number of vineyards and hundreds of micro climates in New York, there was a lot more variation between products than is typical in states were the wineries are national and the climate more uniform. And because we have a lot of variation from year to year in weather (last year tropical storms and flooding this year drought) we do tend to buy more of a wine we like, because next year it may be totally different.

The low points for me were seeing jewelry which I would have bought for my late wife, and later while putting wine in the cellar finding the champagne we were saving for our 50th. If you live long enough you will find that not all your memories are happy ones, comes with not having a boring life.