winery
Recognition and experience help to put Kentucky vineyards on the vintner’s map
Lexington, KY - When Lexington winemakers Ben and Jeanie O’Daniel bottled Jean Farris’ 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon, they suspected it was going to be good. In January, they discovered it was good enough to win a Double Gold at the 2012 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.
The prestigious wine contest is the largest competition for American wines in the world. The 2012 event set a new American wine competition record, with 5,500 entries from 1,379 wineries.
There are hundreds of large and small wine competitions held all over the country, and the opportunities for wines to be judged range from state fairs to prominent events such as the Indy International Wine Competition and the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, which Eric Degerman of Wine Press Northwest calls “the Super Bowl of judging wines.” To win a Double Gold designation, a wine must be unanimously judged Gold by a five-member panel of judges in a blind tasting.
For Ben O’Daniel, this award is the “feather in the cap” that he is most proud of. Jean Farris entered the San Francisco competition to assess how their wines stack up against other American wines.
“Crazy little guys like me send our wines in just to see how we compare to the larger conglomerate-owned wineries,” Ben O’Daniel said. “We were the only winery from outside the major wine-growing regions of California to take a Double Gold.”
In San Francisco, winning a Gold designation or higher comes with obligations. The O’Daniels we asked to bring three cases of wine and to fly to California to pour wine for a public tasting.
At the tasting, they were amused by the feedback from the Californians. As they poured the 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon at a table decorated with the Double Gold plaque and a banner reading “Classic Wine with a Southern Drawl,” tasters asked where the O’Daniels lived. They answered, “Lexington, Ky.” Tasting the wine again, the participants would ask where the wine was made. Again, the O’Daniels answered, “Lexington, Ky.” Still a bit incredulous, the tasters would ask where the grapes were grown, to which the patient O’Daniels responded, “We can see the vines from our front porch — in Lexington, Ky.”
“Yeah, we were a bit of a freak show,” Ben O’Daniel said, but he added that people were excited about the wine and reacted as though they had found “this neat little jewel.”
The judges brought VIP guests to the table and explained to them “how miraculous it was” that Kentucky had produced “a phenomenal wine.”
Perhaps California judges are amazed by the miracle of a good Kentucky wine because, let’s face it: When the world hears Kentucky, the first thoughts are of bourbon, horses and fried chicken, but not award-winning wine.
Amazement that Kentucky can produce a phenomenal wine likely comes because, for the most part, Kentucky winemaking is in its infancy. The majority of the vineyards and wineries operating in the state currently are less than 15 years old. The Kentucky Department of Agriculture said that in 1999 only 67 acres were planted in grapes, compared with more than 500 acres today.
While contemporary winemaking in Kentucky may be young, we have a long history of wine production in the state.
The first commercial vineyard and winery in the United States was established about 25 miles from Lexington, on the Kentucky River in Jessamine County, in 1799 by Swiss winemaker John James Dufour. The fittingly named First Vineyard produced its first vintage in 1803. Unfortunately, in 1809, a killing frost destroyed the grape harvest, and Dufour abandoned the First Vineyard.
Despite setbacks, the wine industry in Kentucky flourished; by the 1800s, Kentucky had become the country’s third largest grape and wine producer and retained that position until the 1920s Prohibition ended the state’s grape and wine production. Farmers planted former vineyards in tobacco. It wasn’t until 1976 that the legislature again allowed Kentucky wineries to operate.
In the late 1990s, the current winemaking boom began when money from the Master Settlement Agreement to compensate tobacco farmers for the anticipated decline in demand for tobacco and tobacco products was given to farmers to convert their acreage to burgeoning vineyards and wineries. This meant that people who had no experience in wine production began growing grapes and making wine.
Tom Cottrell, University of Kentucky Department of Horticulture extension specialist for enology, explained that the learning curve is steep. He was hired in 2005 to help Kentuckians make wine.
Cottrell, a successful winemaker in California, New York’s Finger Lakes and Rhode Island, said that although Kentucky, particularly the Bluegrass region, is an excellent place to grow European-style vinifera grapes and produces some very good wines, “the perception of Kentucky wines is very bad.”
“The image has been killed by the early years when the wine was bad,” he said. But, he added, when he started working in California, people wouldn’t drink California wines either; they wanted French wine. When he worked in the Finger Lakes, drinkers turned up their noses and asked for California wines.
For people to get to know the great wines of Kentucky, “I suggest people go to the wineries and taste the wine there,” Cottrell said.
He complimented several wineries for the good wine they are producing these days, including Jean Farris.
Ben O’Daniel agreed with Cottrell; Kentucky is a good place to grow the grapes for the classic European dry wines he favors.
He described his winning wine as distinctive. It has its own Kentucky flavor profile, much more Bordeaux in character,” he said. “We don’t have silk; we have wool and more bramble-fruit than cassis, although the cassis is there. Our spice notes are different; we have pepper spice rather than eucalyptus.”
Jeanie and Ben O’Daniel are already working to create the perfect blend for Jean Farris’ next great Cabernet Sauvignon. Since winning the competition, they have sold out of the 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon and all their wine sales have been up twenty percent.
The only downside: Ben O’Daniel confessed he was stressed while bottling the 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon — so much so that he tossed and turned in bed, pondering a question that plagues him quite a bit these days: “How do I beat a Double Gold?”
Though the 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon is sold out, Jean Farris donated the last remaining case to the Lexington Cancer Foundation Kentucky Bluegrass Wine Auction, to be auctioned off on May 3. For more information, check online at www.lexingtonfoundation.org.