When the Vikings discovered the new world in the tenth century, to their delight, they found it covered with wild grapes—perhaps the wild fox grapes that grow exuberantly over much of my yard. Optimistically, they dubbed it “Vineland,” with high hopes that endless barrels of fine wine would be forthcoming. Alas, though, the native grapes proved a disappointment when fermented. It tasted awful, compared to European wine.

I can report a similar experience in trying to turn these grapes to wine, myself. Bordeaux is better.

Beyond grape variety, part of the trick in winemaking is in treating the grape properly—planting it in the right spot, carefully cultivating it, and harvesting it at the right time. This is a great art, and it accounts for the tremendous variation in wine flavors even from the same grape. A Riesling grown in Alsace will be higher in acid and less alcoholic than a Riesling grown in southern California because Alsace is cooler and has fewer hours of sunshine.

Grapevines grown near the apple orchard at Nashoba Valley Winery in Bolton. (Courtesy photo by Jonathan Feist)

You see, sunshine ripens fruit, turning the acids, tannins, and such into sugars and other wonderful flavors that attract deer and woodchucks to our orchards. At peak ripeness, a fruit’s flavors are the sweetest and most complex. Then, things start to go downhill. At a point, alcohols start to form, the texture turns to mush, and things get relatively nasty for human consumption, unless done in a carefully controlled environment (i.e., a winery), in which case they get transmogrified into bliss.

It’s interesting to taste a climate’s interpretation of a grape variety—say, a Riesling from a relatively cool region, such as Alsace (Trimbach, Hugel), and one from a warmer climate, such as California (J. Lohr, Bonny Doon). You will likely find that the wine from northern Europe and Nashoba Valley are higher in acid (crisp), relatively lighter in body, and with fruit flavors more like apples than like citrus fruits.

In this way, you can taste a climate, and get some insight into a dimension of nature that is uniquely of a place. I had hoped to do that with Massachusetts—to isolate the flavors of our own terroir, the flavor of the place—but ran into an interesting snag.

My thought was that just as I knew that sunshine ripens fruit, I also knew that Massachusetts is often colder than some regions. Massachusetts has magnificent weather. We have wild winter blizzards, crisp and blustery fall days, stormy spring evenings, thunderstorms, and hot sunny afternoons perfect for lingering at Bare Hill Pond—all fascinating and lovely types of weather, unlike, say, southern California, with its tedious constant sunshine.

Delightful as our weather is, our natural ration of sunshine is better suited to ripening some fruits than others, and unfortunately, the more respectable wine grapes don’t do well here. Cabernet sauvignon, for example, requires more hours of sunshine than what it can scrounge together in Harvard, if it is to be any good. We must import our cabs. This is sad, perhaps, but that’s why travel was invented. Viva la France!

While some grapes, such as Riesling, vignoles, and the ubiquitous chardonnay might survive our climate, the fruit that they yield seems to be of relatively inferior quality when you turn them into wine. On the other hand, apples and pears grow cheerfully here.

So, our local growers focus on what is best suited to our recalcitrant sunshine—which brings me to one of my favorite local places, the Nashoba Valley Winery.

To me, the winery is a regional shrine—an almost holy place, with a museum and a reserve for about 100 varieties of apples, among other fruits. You can and should pick your own there—even though it’s in Bolton, not Harvard.

The winery is a great proponent of the worldwide tradition of fermenting everything within reach into booze, and ferments a host of intoxicants: blueberry wine, mead, beer, single malt scotch, and more. And it ferments grape juice into wine. I recently dropped by for a tasting, hoping to see what a local Riesling tastes like, and thus taste the local terroir.

I was surprised to learn two facts. The first is that currently, the only onsite grape turned into wine there is a vignole, which sadly, is one of my least favorite varieties. The winery imports their other grapes from around New England and New York. So, it’s only sort of local. Then came the second shock. Given our weather, I assumed the Riesling would be dry and acidic, perhaps with overtones of green apples or pears. In fact, it was sweet and heavily citrus. The server said that citrus flavors were actually added. Added?! This revelation stopped me dead in my tracks.

If you can add flavors, why not just set up a syrup bar, like some coffee shops do, where you can add your own flavorings to your wine?

“I like an oaky chardonnay, so let’s add a couple squirts of oak extract. Maybe a teaspoon of tannin too, so it goes better with my steak….”

Whatever happened to wine being the result of the relationship between a grape and its hillside?

After something of an apostatic crisis that lasted several weeks, I’ve worked it out to myself as follows. Alas, the Vikings were right. The Northeast is just terrible for grape wine. To make it taste any good, we have to doctor it up a bit. But let’s call it booze, not wine. And any booze is fun, even if it isn’t particularly delicious. Local booze should be evaluated differently than “wine.”

Pure grape wines have an unfair advantage: the longest, most painstakingly scientific attention that has been given to them, over thousands of years—millennia before the famous and heroic oenological antics of Jesus. Grapes, yeasts, and their associated processes have been tweaked with much more care than any combination of rhubarb and strawberries have been. While the non-grape and grape-plus alcoholic concoctions might have value in their own right, it is simply unfair to compare them to a traditional pinot noir. They are different drinks, with different histories.

Still, I would like to try a very local wine of a common variety that has suffered less monkeying. My own backyard grape wine was made in accordance with a Shaker recipe, and even I added sugar to it. Maybe, this year I’ll try it without. (When I opened it at Thanksgiving, a relatively major explosion occurred, and we continue finding wine stains on the ceiling, so it can likely stand less sugar….) Or maybe, some day, I’ll try to grow some of my own Riesling grapes, so I can compare apples to apples, so to speak. In theory, they should grow here.

Likely, though, the resulting wine will be another disappointing culinary escapade for me. There is a reason why Massachusetts Rieslings have yet to take the world by storm (though my fox grape wine caused a storm of sorts). But at least, I will find solace for the upcoming disappointment in a sip of fine hard cider from the Nashoba Valley Winery, apple grower extraordinaire, and as such, an extractor of the honest taste of Massachusetts terroir, if ever there was one.