I owe my best wine find of 2007 to my 15-month-old baby. The discovery? Pommeaux, a stunning apple dessert wine made by Charles McGonegal at Wisconsin's AEppelTreow Winery. Halfway through a family road trip, in desperate need of out-of-the-car time, we stopped at an apple-themed souvenir store full of apple-shaped coffee mugs, apple butter, and so forth. However, instead of just stretching his legs, my little darling stretched his limits, too—going after the shop's power strips, swiping at the pilot light beneath the hot-water heater, and generally causing chaos. I was desperate to buy something to justify the havoc we were wreaking but really didn't want that something to be apple-shaped pot holders. "What's this?" I asked hopefully, holding up a bottle of dessert wine. It turned out she had a bottle open behind the counter, and she let me taste a bit. As my baby says: "Wow wow whoa!" It had the fragrance of a hundred apple trees in bloom, and more. It tasted honeyed, properly acidic, and well built, and offered complex notes of orange blossom, clove, plum, and the slightest--but a still distinct--framing mineral mist. I bought every bottle they had.
Turns out the fruit that goes into the wine comes from an orchard halfway between Kenosha and Lake Geneva that's planted with some 200 different apple and pear cultivars, most of which are old European heirloom varieties meant for cider and perry. (Apple is to cider as pear is to perry.) The winery, or, more properly, cidery, makes sparkling apple and pear wines fermented using the traditional Champagne method, the sweet Pommeaux (which has a pear-made sister I'm dying to try called Poirissimo), still apple wine, draft-style sparkling ciders, and even single-barrel fermented apple and pear wines. When I say single-barrel, though, I actually mean they make one lone barrel of some of their wines—the cidery's entire production is less than 2,000 cases a year. The only way you can get them is by ordering directly from the vineyard or by visiting one of the very, very few stores in the Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Chicago areas that stock it.
I popped my last bottle of AEppelTreow's Pommeaux last weekend and paired it with my favorite cake, which is an old-fashioned one I make with nothing but local grass-fed butter, grass-fed cream, pasture-raised eggs, sugar, a pinch of salt, and flour. The pairing of incredibly plain, good cake and pure, fragrant apple wine made Midwestern country cuisine seem as breathtaking and ingredient-driven as it must have in those long-ago days before canned soup and cake mixes.
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