Last December I went to a MRG Vine & Wine event at Jaramillo Winery in Belen. As the Wine Appreciation chair for Vine & Wine I’ve hosted several wine events, so having a chance to just enjoy the holiday event had me eager to go. Now I can comment on what I discovered. Sunday night was the last performance of Puccini’s Turandot and my wife and I were there to hear this great opera. We also covered Puccini’s other operas on the show but had to shorten it to make our time slot.
New Mexico True Wines: Jaramillo Winery in Belen
This was a fun event for the MRG Vine & Wine Society with many crafts available as well as an impressive list of wines. Robert and Barbara Jaramillo have upped their game on making good wines. It was many years ago when we were last at their home and vineyards for a pruning demonstration. Since then they’ve added a very large production facility and a long list of wines; 24 at last count. They also have a very good tasting room in downtown Belen. All the grapes are from middle Rio Grande Valley.
I purchased 5 of their wines to pair with food and do an in-depth analysis to see if my initial impression of the wines was correct. Based on the three I have had so far the wines have only impressed me more. This is always good news for me; to see a winemaker improving with age just like his wines.
Jaramillo 2018 Barbera, 14% ABV, $22
A medium-bodied wine with blackberry, tart cherry and spice notes. I paired this with corn tacos filled with grilled turkey, peppers, green chili and tomato. The Barbera held up just fine as the spices were modest by the standard of most New Mexican tacos. This Barbera is closer to an Amador County version than a softer Piedmonté Barbera d’Alba.
Jaramillo 2014 Tempranillo, 13.5% ABV, $22
A medium-bodied full fruit wine with plum, cherry and strawberry and a lush mouthfeel. I was through 3/4 of the bottle before I knew it. That suggested a very high HDI* for the wine. The rest held up perfectly 3 days later when I finished it. That is always a good indication of a well made wine.
* Hammond’s Drinkability Index (HDI): A wine that seduces with every sip. It is useless to try to stop; just enjoy one of life’s pleasures, a wine you love.
2016 Cabernet Franc 12.5% ABV, $24
A bit lighter on alcohol, but not noticeable as the fruit shines through. Soft tannin and flavors of black currant, plum and spice. New Mexico is a good place for this grape. The first NM wine I fell in love with was a Corrales Winery 1999 Cabernet Franc. I tasted many since confirming how well this grape performs in New Mexico.
The remaining two wines require a bit more information because both are based on North American grapes, not Vitis Vinifera.
Norton Grapes: An American Original Written by Dan Mouer
A very good article from a Virginia grape grower and winemaker. He was relating his story of a friend who in 1980 brought over a wine covered in medals from a European wine competition.
The winery was “Monticello,” the name of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home. The name of the wine was Virginia Claret, and the date on the bottle was 1887. What had his friend discovered: a world-class, award-winning Virginia wine from the 19th Century? Was that possible?
The dominant component in that antique wine was a grape with the unsexy name of Norton. A true American grape possibly hybridized with Vitis vinifera, but genetically and ampelographically classified as a cultivar of the native V. aestivalis.
Unlike Europe in North America there are many species of grapes than can be made into wine. Some more successful, such as Vitis lambrusca, some less so or destined to be table grapes. But with Norton it is possible to make world-class wine!
Ampelography is the field of botany concerned with the identification and classification of grapevines, Vitis and subspecies such as Vitis vinifera for European grapes. Traditionally this was done by comparing the shape and color of the vine leaves and grape berries; more recently the study of vines has been revolutionized by DNA fingerprinting.
Dr. Norton was a physician whose small suburban farm was located in the neighborhood of Richmond. His focus was to develop strains of wine grapes suitable for producing world-class wine in Virginia. Sometime between 1818 and 1828, Dr. Norton discovered a seedling growing in his experimental vineyard and soon recognized its extraordinary qualities. Over the remainder of the 19th Century, Norton’s grape variety grew in stature as a wine producer and the Norton was established throughout Virginia, Missouri and Arkansas by the 1840s.
“In 1873, a Norton made just south of St. Louis was declared the ‘best red wine of all nations’ at a worldwide competition in Vienna. The following year, a French commission studying American wines at Montpelier gave Missouri’s Norton wines the same high marks. Many of the nation’s finest hotels and restaurants stocked Missouri and Virginia vintages. President U. S. Grant is known to have kept a righteous supply in his White House cellars.” See Paul L. Roberts
Montpelier is the French academic enological center and where grape growers often source the various clones of grapes like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from Montpelier’s vine nursery.
Lincoln, recalling Gen. Grant’s successes, said that if he could find out what brand of whisky Grant drank, he would send a barrel of it to all the other commanders. Apparently that applied to wine as well.
Jaramillo 2018 Norton, 13.5% ABV, $24
This is a big, bold red and black berries wine with fruitcake-like spices perfect for the holidays. Norton is considered the only indigenous American grape that produces great wines. This one really impressed me and displays Robert’s talent as a winemaker.
World Class Grapes for Gold Medal Wines (DVR website)
Davis Viticultural Research, is a private corporation that is not directly affiliated with any educational or governmental institution. The following information is from their website. They are very enthusiastic about the Crimson Cabernet grape; a French-American hybrid, which they offer to grape growers.
This hybrid represents the culmination of a centuries-long search for the viticultural Holy Grail; vines that would have the disease resistance and winter hardiness of the best American vine, Norton combined with the superior wine quality of European Cabernet Sauvignon. Over the last 150 years, various growers, and institutions have tried to breed Norton with other grapes to come up with better varieties.
No one succeeded. There was not (until now) a single commercial Norton hybrid. The same was true for Cabernet Sauvignon. No one (until now) had success in making any commercially viable interspecific crosses with Cabernet.
Norton and Cabernet were two grapes that proved to be almost impossible to successfully breed with other vines, and the task of trying to breed these two unwilling parents together seemed likely to be quixotic, or herculean at best. One Midwestern state has sadly devoted 14 years and over two million dollars trying to cross Norton with Cabernet, with no releases yet in sight.
But DVR did it. Back in 2001 they were able to get these two confirmed bachelor(ette)s to fall for one another, and they became the proud parents of Crimson Cabernet and Cabernet Doré, and we now have hundreds of acres, and growers, in 32 states. Including New Mexico where Robert Jaramillo is proving the worth of this hybrid grape.
Crimson Cabernet was developed in Davis, California, by Lucian Dressel with the advice and guidance of Dr. Harold Olmo and the staff of the USDA Germ Plasm Repository. The vine is covered by a US Patent owned by DVR. The goal in creating Crimson Cabernet was to breed a grape that would make a wine that was totally Vitis vinifera-like in quality, yet was able to withstand the greater disease pressures and harsher weather conditions which in much of the US makes vinifera wine growing extremely difficult, or impossible.
In the vineyard, Crimson Cabernet vines have proven to be very resistant to such foliar diseases as powdery mildew, black rot, and bunch rot, as well as the vine diseases crown gall and Pierce’s Disease. It is also grown on its own roots since they have proven to be resistant to Phylloxera.
It remains to be seen how well this grape will perform in the many areas where Vitis vinifera is severely challenged by weather, but it is promising.
Jaramillo Crimson Cabernet NV, 14% ABV, $32
This was the first time I tried Crimson Cabernet and I was impressed. Not only that but I learned about a new grape that has a bright future here and across the US. The wine is medium-bodied with velvety tannins and flavors of dark berries, black currant and plum.
The Music of Giacomo Puccini
Last Sunday night was the last performance of Puccini’s Turandot by Opera Southwest. Conducted by Anthony Barrese and directed by XinXin Tang; this is the final opera of the season and what a way to finish. Who can hear that name without thinking of opera by one its greatest composers? I know few operas that hit me with the emotional force of a Puccini aria and yes, I did shed tears.
Puccini was born Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini in Lucca, Italy, in 1858. I hope you’re OK if I just say Puccini. The first Giacomo Puccini was maestro di cappella of the Cattedrale di San Martino in Lucca a post his family held for 124 years. Since the young Giacomo was too young the post went away. However he was associated with the cathedral as choir boy and later organist. He later continued his studies at the Milano Conservatory.
The following information was partially obtained from www.udiscovermusic.com. The site also includes extracts and arias of Puccini.
The sublime Manon Lescaut (Feb,1893) secured Puccini’s international reputation once and for all. George Bernard Shaw declared, “Puccini now looks more like the heir to Verdi than any of his rivals!” Manon chooses luxury over love and paid the ultimate price.
La Bohème’s (Feb, 1896) a story of young artists living hand-to-mouth in 1830s Paris was not so distant from the composer’s own student experiences in Milano. The emotional authenticity of his music, which dramatizes the details of the action and the characters’ minutest emotions, touched audiences at the first performance in 1896 and has continued to do so ever since. Arguably Puccini’s best work, La Bohème overflows with sublime melodies, sumptuously orchestrated, and quickly became the hottest opera ticket in town.
Tosca (Jan, 1900) tells a hard-hitting story of intrigue and torture set in the political unrest of Rome in 1800. Puccini ratchets up the tension from the start, maintaining his hold on audiences through the violent, modernist impact of his harmony and orchestration. Tosca caused a sensation at its 1900 Rome premiere and not just for the music – there was a bomb scare in the front rows of the stalls before the opera had barely got underway! The style of opera Puccini employed was called verismo.
In opera, verismo (Italian for ‘realism’, from vero, meaning “true”) was a post-Romantic operatic tradition associated with Italian composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano, Francesco Cilea and Giacomo Puccini. Verismo as an operatic genre had its origins in an Italian literary movement of the same name. This was in turn related to the international literary movement of naturalism as practiced by Émile Zola and others.
Incredibly the La Scala premiere of Madama Butterfly, (Feb 1904) one of Puccini’s best works, was met by jeers, whistles, and farmyard noises – as the whole thing had been organized by Puccini’s jealous musical rivals! Puccini instantly withdrew the opera, and it triumphed three months later in a revised form. Its tragic story of a Japanese geisha betrayed by a visiting American sailor is given heartfelt treatment in Puccini’s melodies, with the exotic touches of his score delicately depicting the work’s Nagasaki setting.
The original version of Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala on 17 February 1904 with Rosina Storchio in the title role. It was initially greeted with great hostility (probably largely owing to inadequate rehearsals).
This version was in two acts; after its disastrous premiere, Puccini withdrew the opera, revising it for a second premiere at Brescia in May 1904 and performances globally. In 1907, Puccini made his fifth and final revisions in a version, known as the standard version. Today, this is the version most often performed around the world.
La Fanciulla Del West (Dec, 1910) or The Girl of the Golden West, hardly sounds like a Puccini opera, but it was and commissioned and premiered by the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Although previously long neglected, the opera is now achieving the popularity it deserves. It has an epic quality ideally suited to its Californian setting and a breadth and scale all its own. Tickets for the Metropolitan Opera premiere of The Golden Girl of the West went on the black market for as much as $150 – which back in 1910 was a small fortune!
La Rondine (‘The Swallow’) (March, 1917) is a gentle domestic comedy. The Swallow finds Puccini at his most emotionally deft and skillful, composing with a masterly fastidiousness that spills over in the unforgettable ‘Chi Il Belsogno Di Doretta.’ Puccini’s soaring music belies the heartbreak to come.
Gianni Schicchi (Dec, 1918) takes place in 13th-century Florence, and the story was derived from a passage in Dante’s Inferno. In Puccini’s comedy Gianni Schicchi is asked to fix a will on behalf of a family so that they inherit, but instead cunningly makes himself and his daughter the sole beneficiaries. The opera includes the well-known aria ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ (‘Oh, My Adored Father’).
The aria is really a plea to their father to be well remembered in his will. Yet it’s one of Puccini’s most sublime arias.
While composing Turandot, (April, 1926) Puccini felt that his powers were at their height. The work is indeed his grandest structure, drawing on the resources of a vast orchestra and giving a major role to the chorus. Turandot, one of Puccini’s best works, is an oriental operatic melodrama in which Calaf wins the hand of the eponymous ice-cold Princess of Peking, having successfully answered three riddles, thus avoiding execution. Puccini used authentic Chinese melodies in the opera, just as he had drawn on Japanese ones in Madama Butterfly.
He employed a pentatonic scale of 5 notes per octave, rather than the heptatonic scale of 7 notes per octave.
‘Nessun Dorma‘, the most famous aria from Puccini’s Turandot, has arguably become the most famous of all operatic arias, largely as a result of Pavarotti’s performance of it at umpteen events and arenas following its use as the theme song of the BBC’s 1990 FIFA World Cup coverage. Pavarotti’s interpretation on Zubin Mehta’s 1972 essential recording remains the benchmark by which all others are measured.
When Opera Southwest sent out requests for the chorus singers they added more names than needed assuming some would turn it down. None did, they all wanted to be in an Opera Southwest production. If you enjoy opera subscribe early so you don’t miss any of their operas for the 2023-24 season.
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