La Chiripada Winery

There is a healthy dose of perfume on the nose of this wine: you can also immediately detect the presence of a hybrid. Reminiscent of a Cayuga White from New York, you know it’s going to have some residual sugar, and there is no shortage of candy in the nose, mostly Jolly Roger. There’s also a lot of honeysuckle and lilac and perfume, much like a Viognier. On the palate, it’s flinty, with lots of hearty applesauce, and hints of vanillin from the oak in which it’s aged. Primarily Vidal Blanc, with a dollop of Riesling and a good shot of Chardonnay, 75 percent of the grapes in this wine are                                                               grown in the Rio Embudo Valley where the winery is located.

Vidal Blanc is one of the commercially-successful hybrids courtesy of French (Bordeaux) hybridizer Albert Seibel, who crossed Ugni Blanc (Trebbiano), with an early French American hybrid, Rayon d’Or. It is made in a variety of styles, from light and crisp with racy acid to Ice Wine. Here, we are somewhere in the middle, and the Chardonnay adds more “less” in this case, to keep it pretty light and airy, but not fluffy. If there’s one fruit that this wine really delivers in spades, it’s Golden Delicious apples.

Reviewed January 21, 2008 by Laura Ness.