Tomasello Winery

My first experience with Tomasello Winery was back in 2005. My wife and I went to the annual Grand Harvest Wine Festival held at Alba Vineyard in Finesville, NJ with our friends, Donnie and Denise. Each year over twenty wineries from New Jersey are represented (you should definitely go to a wine festival if you like wine. You simply pay $20 per person and you receive a souvenir tasting glass and you get to go around to the different wineries’ tents and sample anything that they have on hand. It’s a great way to try new wines and find new favorites. I highly suggest going if you’ve never been). This is where I became acquainted with Tomasello and I have been a big fan ever since.

Tomasello is one of the oldest wineries in New Jersey and boasts one of the best varieties of wines in the state, from dry reds to sparkling champagnes to sweet whites to tart fruit wines. If they don’t grow the grapes or fruit that they use on their own land, they purchase it from a local grower. That itself is admirable.

My favorite kinds of wine are the dry reds (as I jokingly like to say, I want to be able to taste the soil the grapes were grown in). I think that dry red wines offer some of the deepest and richest flavors and that is one of the reasons why I love them.

Now, to be perfectly honest, I’m anything but a wine snob. I have tried to sniff, swirl, check out the legs, and the clarity, but a lot of that stuff is lost on me; it just doesn’t make sense. My palate must be severely underdeveloped because I can’t taste the difference between oak, tannin, star anise or any of the myriad other flavors that other people seem to be able to detect without effort (unless they’re faking it to make themselves seem like smarter than their friends). To me a wine either tastes good or it doesn’t. Either the wine is bitter or it’s sweet or it’s something else entirely.

And forget about smelling the wine. I like to smell a wine because I think that its aroma is one of its most intoxicating qualities, but I’ll be damned if I can isolate scents like vanilla, honeydew, citrus, sweaty saddle (gross, I know (think about it if you don't get it immediately), but it is an actual scent some folks use to describe wine. Really. I read it in a magazine) or anything else. To me either a wine smells good or it doesn’t. That’s the way it’s going to stay until my palate develops more or I decide to try to fake people out and just outright lie to them (“This wine has an aroma of honeydew with subtle nuances of citrus and essence of frog”).

Tomasello has some of the best smelling and tasting dry reds I’ve ever had. I used to have two bottles of their Shiraz and Pinot Noir and one bottle of their Chambourcin (I went a little nuts last time I went to a festival. I spent nearly $200 on wine. It was an awesome day…until I added up the receipts after I’d gotten home and sobered up). I’ve long since drank those and just this past weekend picked up another bottle of their Shiraz. It is amazing stuff.

My wife likes their Ranier Red because she doesn’t like dry reds. We were introduced to Ranier Red by our friends, Dan and Lisa. I like it, too, but Ranier Red is a sweeter red that I can only drink a little of at a time because to me this wine tastes like candy. Any substantial amount has a tendency to turn my stomach. If you like sweeter reds, this is definitely the one for you.

As far as whites go, I’m not much of a white wine (or rose or blush) person. I have had some in the past and I do prefer drier whites to their sweeter counterparts, but they’re just not my area of expertise (there technically is no area of expertise for me, really). Unlike Tomasello’s Shiraz, Chambourcin and Pinot Noir, I have not found that one white wine that screams for me to love it. I keep hoping that Tomasello would produce a white that I totally fall in love with but so far they just haven’t. And that’s disappointing to me because I really admire their wines.

Tomasello produces some of the best fruit wines I’ve ever had. Their blueberry in particular is extremely good. It’s not too sweet, preserves well the tartness of the berry, and the alcohol blends well with the wine. Have you ever had a wine where the flavor of the alcohol takes over the flavor of the wine to the point where it tastes more like a liqueur? Not here, my friends. This wine is a perfect balance. Their Cranberry and American Almonique wines are also worth mentioning, as is their champagne. In fact, at the last festival I was at they mixed equal parts champagne with blueberry wine (a type of Kir) and it was amazing. You should definitely try it if you get the chance.

I have been a fan of Tomasello wines for almost five years now and have enjoyed every drop of that time. I look forward to the next time I’m able to go to a festival and just spend the afternoon sampling their wines.

4 stars out of 5

Tomasello Winery Tasting Room

The Good:
Great wines

The Bad:
The sales lady did not know the wines
Prices jacked over retail store prices

The Ugly:
Limited to four samples

New Jersey is home to over 30 wineries and some of the best, in my opinion, are located in the southern part of the state. Our daughter was at my parents’ house for the weekend so my wife and I decided to go on our own little wine tour, which is where you travel to several wineries and sample many of their offerings, something we’d never be able to do with a rambunctious (albeit, lovable) 6 year old in tow.

One of our favorite wineries is Tomasello Winery in Hammonton, NJ. I like their reds, Tiff likes their Almonique, and we both love their blueberry wine. It is very convenient because there are many different wines that come out of this winery that we both love. So when we decided to go on our little wine tour, it made sense that Tomasello be a part of our itinerary. Actually, it was the very first stop on our trip.

We were excited when we pulled in to the driveway at Tomasello partly because we’d always wanted to visit the winery and their tasting room. The building looked nice; to the right was the tasting room (we didn’t concern ourselves with the room to the left). We entered the room and there was another couple just finishing up their tasting adventure. My wife and I went to the other side of the bar and picked up a wine list and started to talk about what we wanted to try. It had been about two and a half years since either of us had gone to a wine festival and our supply of Jersey wines has long since been consumed, so we were due to stock up.

The other couple finally left and we walked up to the bar, Tiff to the right near the white and sweeter wines, and myself to the left, hovering near the reds. The bar itself was small and overcrowded with just about each different type of wine they offer represented, awards dangling from the bottles’ necks. In fact, there were only two narrow places on each side of the bar in which to pass your tasting glass back and forth to the sales person.

We stood in front of the bar and the woman, who really didn’t speak much and seemed somewhat cold and snobby, told us their tasting rules: she would give each of us four tickets and we could taste one wine per ticket.

Wait a minute; did you just say I could only taste four wines? Four out of 42? I had better luck than that with women in college (and I got pretty much nowhere with women when I was in college, by the way)!!!

We weren’t there to get drunk and we weren’t even going to attempt to get close to trying even half of the wines. My one goal was to try a few different things and see if there was anything new that would interest me, especially the whites. My wife was looking forward to trying their Port and some new fruit wines. But our thought process evolved into: why waste a ticket on something we may not like? So I decided to play it safe and make sure the things I liked two years ago were still good (their Shiraz, Chambourcin and Pinot Noir). I took a chance with my last ticket. I tried their Port (it was pretty good).

Seriously, if you’re going to be limited in what you can taste, why bother? It’s hard enough to find a new favorite when you can try as many as you want let alone being limited to less than 10% of their offerings!

Okay, so we resigned ourselves to being limited to four measly sips of wine. Meanwhile, we made the mistake of trying to get the bartender to talk to us. First of all, she didn’t really know much about the wine. This was made apparent when she told us that she doesn’t really know much about the wine. My question: then why the hell are you working behind the counter trying to sell wine?! That’s like having an English professor that only speaks Swahili. Stupid!

She eventually started to loosen up and lose the stuck-up demeanor that we’d pegged her for early on. She started to make recommendations for my wife, which was nice. The only problem was that she insisted on recommending wines that my wife told her that she wasn’t interested in. Then the sales lady began talking about her grandson named Gray and her other grand kids. I appreciate the recommendation attempts and the conversation, lady, but my wife and I need to strategize our next samples so we don’t waste them, so please shut the !@#$ up, is what I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I am a gentleman.

What kills me is that Tomasello Winery turns out such great wine and yet their tasting room is bound by such dumb rules (and that sales person. She must be a relative because otherwise she should have been fired a long time ago, and would have been if I were in charge). We were there for maybe half an hour and I did not enjoy my time there at all.

A word of warning, and another reason not to go to their tasting room: They sell their blueberry wine for $10 per bottle in the tasting room. If you can find the wine at a wine store like Wine Legend in Cherry Hill, NJ (on the wall to the right as you enter the store) you will pay about $7.50 per bottle.

You’re welcome.

After we left we went to three other wineries and we were not limited in the number of samples we could taste. They seemed to understand that sometimes customers need to try a variety of wines in order to find a wine that they like. In fact, the other sales people kept pouring and insisting that we try other wines! And that is how I believe it should be when you go to taste wines. You should not be limited - within reason (i.e. if you are visibly drunk and/or belligerent).

Based on this experience, I would recommend only tasting Tomasello wines at a wine festival where you can pay $20 and taste everything they have as well as everything everyone else has. Do not go to their tasting room. You have been warned.

0 stars out of 5