Is Black Wine the New Orange?
Among vinophiles, homemade wine has always had an unsavory reputation. For law-abiding drinkers, however, D.I.Y. was almost the only option during Prohibition, when a loophole in the Volstead Act allowed Americans to consume about two-and-a-half bottles of the stuff per household per day. The preferred grape for amateur vintners was one that wasn’t particularly popular with the professionals: alicante bouschet, described in one 1883 wine guide as lacking “elegance, force and delicacy.” It’s what’s known as a teinturier variety, meaning that, unlike most red grapes, its pulp as well as its skin are deeply colored, resulting in wines so dark that they’re almost black. This intense pigmentation allowed thrifty winemakers to press a single batch of grapes two or three times, yielding a richly colored liquid again and again. The only problem? As the author Daniel Okrent writes in “Last Call,” his 2011 history of Prohibition, the wine made from alicante bouschet tasted “truly lousy.”
It’s no surprise, then, that post-repeal the fruit was considered highly undesirable. Its profile took another hit in 1937, when France failed to include alicante bouschet on its official list of allowed grapes for winemakers. Now, however, after languishing for almost a hundred years, teinturier grapes and the inky wines they produce, which range in flavor from jammy to tannic, are finally starting to shake off the stigma. As trendsetters in the natural wine world — including Manhattan’s Chambers restaurant, which was among the first to champion hybrid grapes — begin to feature teinturier producers, some are asking: Is black actually the new orange?
In Spain and Portugal, alicante bouschet never fully fell out of favor. Its preferred role, though, was as a tinting grape, used in small amounts to deepen the hue of lighter varieties. In recent years, Iberian winemakers have started to recognize the fruit’s other merits. Envinate, a Spanish wine label whose offerings have a cult following, makes a blend called Albahra from an unfiltered mix of 30 percent moravia agria and 70 percent alicante bouschet — or as it’s known there, garnacha tintorera. In their hands, the ripe-fruit heaviness of tintorera is restrained with a short period of skin contact and balanced with the acidity of moravia agria, a local grape that is almost sour even when at its peak. Alicante bouschet also thrives in the sunny Alentejo region east of Lisbon, where wineries like Ode are beginning to experiment with single varietals that celebrate the grape’s dark plum and berry notes.
In California, where alicante bouschet plants were largely ripped out post-Prohibition, the winemaker Raj Parr, 51, is dedicated to honoring the state’s history via its forgotten vines. His dramatically hued Scythians Red is about one third alicante bouschet, which he sources from an abandoned plot close enough to Ontario airport that the leaves shake when planes pass overhead. “It looked more like a graveyard of vines than a vineyard,” Raj recalls of the first time he saw the place.
