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Variety Spotlights: Brianna and Frontenac
I’d like to take a minute and recognize how some older varieties continue to impress me. Like many fruit growers in the East, our vineyard got hit by a very hard freeze in late May this past year. It wiped out the crop on some varieties completely. But others showed a combination of later bud break, hardier tissues and fruitful secondary buds.
Among a few other tough varieties (Petite Pearl, Crimson Pearl, Verona, L’Acadie Blanc and St. Pepin and Itasca make that frost resilient list too), the Frontenac family of vines and Brianna came back strong and filled the trellis.
We know that secondary buds tend to produce a crop that is about 50%-60% of what primary buds can produce, and that the clusters tend to be smaller. But Brianna gave us a fruiting wire filled with dense, half pound clusters that ripened with their signature pineapple aroma and flavor. A few rows over, the Frontenac noir, blanc and gris had a nice curtain of fruit hanging too. It’s a nice feeling to harvest hand-fulls of Frontenac at a time. Each of the Frontenac varieties did equally well. Truly these varieties are grower-friendly work horses whose resilience can give us confidence that there will be fruit every year. It seems natural to me that we should consider how these varieties can be put to work for us to make great wines.
Brianna rises to the top as a crowd pleaser wherever it is made. Its big aromatics make wines that stand out among the crowd. I’ve seen Brianna do well in a wide range of wine styles, from dry and still to sweet and unctuous, and as an incredible sparkling wine.
Frontenac has been widely planted for a long time now. And plenty of experience has been had with Frontenac blanc and Frontenac gris also. Many growers know well how great these varieties are in the vineyard. Excellent disease resistance and cold hardiness is combined with big, rewarding clusters.
What continues to surprise me though is the diversity of wines being produced from these grapes. High acidity, high sugar and lots of flavor drive many producers toward off-dry and sweet wines, and these can be really popular additions to a wine list, or the backbone of a winery. Blended wines have no boundaries though. Sparkling wines harness high acidity and are delicious.
By accentuating the positive characteristics of these grapes, an infinite array of wines and styles can be achieved. On a recent trip to Montreal, Quebec, I encountered dozens of wines that put a new take on Frontenac family. All were presented with unique labels and brands and easily stood next to international wines on the shelf of wine markets. Quebec is as tough a place to grow grapes as exists in the north.
The abundance of wines made from Frontenac, Frontenac blanc and Frontenac gris are evidence of how productive and valuable these varieties can be.
