One of the jokes between Neil & I is that we’re the exact same person. It can be generally taken that if I enjoyed a particular food or drink, Neil would probably enjoy it also, and vice versa. In fact, watching us eat can be rather disturbing, as our plates tend to become communal property. Anyhow, this near-universal principle hit a roadblock at our recent wine tasting at Wagner Vineyards by Seneca Lake in upstate New York wine country. Admittedly, our tastes in wine haven’t been as similar as our tastes in beer (and I would argue that my taste is cocktails is quite a bit less cavity-licious than his), but we’ve never been at such a complete disagreement before.

After a couple ho-hum tastings of their reds offerings, we got into the better stuff — Rieslings, Gerwutztraimer, etc. Our first taste of their white wine was of a rather obscure grape, the Niagara grapes, crossed between Concord and white Cassady grapes and created in the same region its grown. A sniff yielded intense intense fruity scents, mainly of grape juice. It tasted exactly like it was scented. Amazing!!

Me:” WOW! This is… this is truly delicious! O_O”
Neil & other friend: “… This… this is really weird.” *spits it out*

I ended up buying a bottle of the stuff ($7 or something). But why, oh why, did I enjoy this fermented grape juice so very much? What instinctive tastebud was this grape setting off? And why wasn’t my fellow travelers similarly affected? (In fact, why were they looking at me like I had just grown a second head?)

We consumed the bottle later that night; it didn’t taste as good, probably because it wasn’t chilled enough - or maybe because of peer pressure(!)

It all made sense when I got back home and starting systematically wikipedia’ing everything we passed by on the trip (what, you don’t do that when you travel?).

While only rarely available fresh outside of these areas, Niagara grapes are well known to most American consumers as the source of most white grape juice.
- Niagara (grape) // Wikipedia

White grape juice!!! You know, the sugary fruit juice we’re used to grabbing in 48oz plastic bottles from the room temperature juices found in your generic chain grocery store. Growing up in an Asian household, I never drank fruit juice (or soda, or coffee, or milk…) as a kid, and what little I had of regular grape juice from school, I had never enjoyed.

Last year, however, while at a friend’s place, complaining about how nasty grape juice is, my friend insisted I try some of the white grape juice she had in the fridge. Whaddyaknow, I likey. I likeyed alot. I still haven’t bought a bottle for myself yet, but I do manage to drink a glass of theirs whenever I go over (I’m not as bad a freeloader as this sentence makes me sound).

And Welch’s white grape juice, my friends, is exactly what this wine tastes of. I could probably drink it in equal quantities and not even noticing that I’m imbibing wine. So perhaps the only difference between my palate and those of my fellow traveling wine tasters is an affinity for white grape juice?

Either way, I’m going to have a buy another bottle of this stuff and bring it to my friend that I’m continually filching white grape juice from. Yum!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Juice, New York, Traveling, Wine.