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