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Teutonic Wine Company 2017 Boyar Wedding Feast Red Wine
Alsatian style wines, turned up to 11
Barnaby Tuttle was doing great. He was the general manager and wine buyer for the famed Papa Haydn restaurant – a Viennese “Kaffeehaus” in Portland. But then, a wine importer brought him fourteen Rieslings to consider from the Mosel Valley region of Germany. He fell in love with them all, and proceeded to cultivate one of the largest German wine lists in the city.
Not satisfied with merely buying wine, Barnaby told his wife, Olga, that he wanted to craft wines with as much terroir and character as those Rieslings. So, with no formal training, they found a small piece of land and in 2005 planted two thousand vines. Barnaby quit his job and worked from the bottom up at a variety of small wineries in the valley. They now buy grapes from a variety of wineries throughout the region but are committed to sites that are high elevation and completely dry farmed.
Today, Teutonic has a tasting room and production facility in Portland’s industrial Southeast, and they’ve become known for their Alsatian-style wines with quirky character and amazing quality.
(And yes, it’s true – quite a few of their wines are named in honor of the film “This is Spinal Tap”.)
Cellar 503 Tasting Notes
Teutonic Wine Company, Portland, Oregon
2017 Boyar Wedding Feast Red Wine
Old & Cold, High & Dry, Wood & Wild. These are the words that Olga and Barnaby Tuttle of Teutonic Wine Company live by. They source fruit from old vines in cold, high elevation wineries that are dry farmed. They use only neutral oak to age their wines and only wild yeast for fermentation. And everything is done in the Alsatian style – always!
So, what’s in this bottle simply labeled “red wine”? Some sort of experimental blend? No, it’s even more radical than that. It’s… Merlot. 100% Merlot.
Ever since THAT movie back in 2004, wine drinkers have shunned Merlot. But this is not an over-the-top, jammy California-style Merlot. It’s not even a typical Oregon-style Merlot. This is pure Teutonic.
You still get the lovely dark, blackberry fruit coming through but in such a restrained style that it almost feels like a different varietal. With their usual emphasis on acid, this will be the perfect bottle with your Thanksgiving dinner – like the cranberry on your dinner table, the tartness will cut right through all the butter, gravy, and richness on your plate.
A Cellar 503 selection in November 2021, Thanksgiving Wines Rogue Valley | Merlot
