I recently ran across an article from the renowned wine writer Jancis Robinson about pushing viticultural boundaries. You can view the article here: http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/a201011091.html
It’s a great article about how people around the world are planting grapes where they haven’t traditionally been grown before in places like Belgium, Poland and Norway. The one thing that caught my eye immediately was a very favorable mention of Regent wines from Holland! Jancis has always had an open mind about new and interesting grapes and I wish more wine writers around the world would be open to such innovations as Regent (hardly a new grape, being 43 years old). I’d love to get my hands on some of that Dutch Regent, the couple of examples I’ve had from Germany were disappointing, but I’m sure I’m not getting the best examples here in the USA.
I first became familiar with Regent in about 1999. Gary Moulton was running the grape studies at the WSU Mt. Vernon Research station and had just recently acquired from Canada and had heard good things about this grape. We got a few vines and were able to plant 25 experimental vines. It did really well out on Maury Island and in the picture on the left you can see we had nice big full clusters of dark red fruit that never needed to be sprayed for mildews. It wasn’t until Ron Nelson planted an acre or so of this stuff that we were able to truly see the potential. Now I am a true believer in Regent as one of the top red grape selections for the Puget Sound region. Other things mentioned in the article that I found interesting was that some in Holland are also planting Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc both of which have great potential on the west side of the Cascades here in Washington.
One thing open for debate is whether this is due to global warming or the increased interest in wine growing around the world. I think it might be a little bit of both. I do think mainly it is that people are exploring every nook and cranny around the world with an eye on wine grape growing and opening areas unthinkable in the past, but were probably decnet growing areas never explored.
We are bottling our 2009 Regent next week. I think many of you will be blown away by it… Look for it to go on sale in February some time…
