We tasted excellent Cherry Creek Cellars wines today in their beautiful tasting room in a restored 1870 one-room schoolhouse in the Irish Hills in Michigan.
We’ve written before about Cherry Creek Cellars’ wonderful, award-winning Montage 2003, a big, BIG red blend. It is Melody’s great favorite and she guards the last several bottles of a case that we bought at Christmas 2005 with her life.
We bought a mixed case of their Montage (a new 2005 vintage), cabernet, merlot, and one bottle of “Proprietor’s Reserve,” which had a one-bottle limit per customer. We’ll be writing about each one individually, but here are some impressions from our tastings.
o The 2005 Montage is delicious: tannic, tasting of dark cherries. To Tom it tasted not quite as all-out big as the 2003 (we compared the 2003 to a Corvette), but nonetheless excellent.
o The 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon is tannic and dry, very nice.
o The 2005 Merlot has a very nice soft taste, fruity (black cherries), and dry.
o We focused on the big reds, as we always do, but we tried several of their other wines. Dune is a white wine from the Auxerrois grape. It has excellent tastes of apple and other light fruits, not super dry. We drink very little white wine but this tasted quite good.
o Ninja Red is a semi-dry red, similar to a Lambrusco. It is slightly sweet, as it is intended to be, light, and very easy drinking.
o Fetter Hahn is their black raspberry dessert wine; it has wonderful black-raspberry flavor, is quite sweet, and would be wonderful with chocolate at dessert.
Melody: We had a lot of fun today tasting wine at Cherry Creek Cellars. Brandon was behind the bar doing an excellent job of serving the wine. I learned that he is a Siena Heights college student with about 30 credits remaining before he’ll receive his business degree. He let me ring the school bell! Very loud and reminiscent of the little two-room brick school house that I attended from kindergarten through third grade. That school was called “Inverness” and it was located on Polish Line Road in Cheboygan, Michigan. But, I digress. . . I found the dry, red wines to be delicious. I was pleasantly surprised by the Merlot. I was inspired by the Cabernet! It was everything I had hoped it would be. I am eager to try the one bottle of their reserve, which we were unable to taste due to their low supply. We will describe the wines more fully and completely as we open and enjoy them in the very near future! We are quite eager. . .
