A Wine Buff's Take On Floridean Viticulture

Post date: Feb 11, 2015 12:42:03 AM

We've now visited 3 Florida wineries - Dakotah, Lakeridge and San Sebastian (we tried to visit one in Panama City, but the sign said "Closed For Good"). The principal Florida grape is Muscadine (pronounced "muscaDYNE"), a species native to the South of North America. Scuppernong grape is a Muscadine. Its designation is vitus rotundifolia, as distinguished from vitus lambrusca (native American Concord, Mission, etc.) and vitus vinifera (European varietals such as Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, etc.). It thrives on the extreme heat and humidity of Florida summers, unlike the other two. In Florida, Budding begins in March and Harvest comes relatively early, beginning in June and always done by September.  Both white and red wines produced from Muscadine are naturally semi-sweet to  dessert-sweet.  The University of Florida has created hybrids such as Stover, Suwanee and Blanc de Bois, to supplement the Muscadines.  The hybrids I tasted were very dry.  I'm not a Muscadine person - to me, it has little or no nose and a flat, sweet taste. That's not to say it's bad wine.  It is well made wine but just not to my taste. San Sebastian winery makes over one million bottles per year, so I'm obviously in the minority here.  I did really like a Dakotah winery fortified "cream sherry" made from Muscadine very much, though.  I found out that, unlike California, it is legal to add sugar to wine in Florida.  I'm presuming this is done to increase the alcohol content, not to make the wine sweeter, although I don't know for sure.  Bottle life for Florida wines is only around 2 years.  Again I'm guessing, but the grapes probably don't have the necessary tannins and other compounds to age well.

(Note:  I looked up Gallo wine production for comparison to San Sebastian.  According to the Internet, Gallo produces 260 BILLION bottles per year, with and without Gallo labels, and 900 MILLION bottles with the Gallo label on them. That's 5 billion per week and 17 million per week, respectively. Makes San Sebastian's one million look teeny.)

In two of the wineries we visited, you have to take a tour in order to taste their wine, ending with an excruciatingly lengthy tasting of 4 or 5 wines for about 30 people and a lecture, shouted over the din of a lot of chatty people.  Not fun.  Dakotah winery was great, however. We began by feeding the wood ducks in the pond in the back and then chatting with the owner/winemaker who was very informative.

After all is said and done, Florida produces the most interesting wines that I've ever tasted.