Whippoorwill Vineyards

Wine: Winery: Ambiance: Feb 16, 2012

Norton Wine Review: I presume the name Whippoorwill was easier to spell than naming the vineyard for its location, ~ Notasulga, Alabama. A relatively new, large 14 acre vineyard set in a rural setting east of Montgomery, AL along I-85. Only four of the fourteen offerings could be considered dry. After visiting a few Deep South wineries, it’s obvious that Southerners like their wines as sweet as they like their tea. We tackled five of their offerings which included a Lenoir “Black Spanish”, Cynthiana, Noble, a very dry ‘Harvest Moon’ muscadine and one semi-sweet Saugahatchee Creek muscadine. Though interesting to taste the sharp dark Lenoir wine, we were disappointed that they would serve a wine that they admitted had been opened for four days previously. We left with another bottle in hopes of a better unique tasting. The Noble muscadine wine had an unpleasant musty scent with a clouded taste. The white ‘Harvest Moon’ muscadine wine surprised us how dry such a grape can be prepared. As for their venture in working with the Norton grape, they succeeded in presenting an ‘easy’ drink now wine. Not very complex in its short lived tastes, but interesting with the hints of oak coming from the use of American medium toast “oak spirals”. The vines and wine are much too young to seriously compare to other mature offerings found in other states, but still, we had fun visiting this ever so cooperative host. Time will present them with a niche they are searching for and the Montgomey community will learn about them soon.