This Week's THURSDAY Tasting
Taste with the Winemaker: Vincent Fritzsche
June 19, 2025
Oregon Pinots & Chardonnays of Poise and Purity
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This Week Thursday, June 19, 2025 Taste with the Winemaker: Vincent Fritzsche In-store, 5 - 6:30pm
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Vincent Fritzsche is a minimalist, which is to say, a natural winemaker. After years of apprenticeship on the West Coast and hobbyist winemaking, he opened his small winery in 2009.
In the vineyard, he thinks of harvesting fruit as a chef would about cooking ingredients, relying on intuition gained from experience to tease out the best. He prefers lower sugars and more acidity to blowsy, overripe fruit and high alcohol, to focus on the character that the grape, site, and vintage bring to a wine.
He works with just eight northern Willamette vineyards, at minimum, sustainably farmed, some organic or biodynamic
White grapes are typically pressed whole cluster and racked into older French oak barrels. Then, it is naturally fermented over many months, which preserves its freshness. There is no lees stirring to thicken the wines. The barrels are simply kept topped off and otherwise not touched for either one year or eighteen months.
The wines are as understated as the man himself. On close tasting, they reveal themselves to be of impeccable poise, expression, and balance. They are light on the palate, with alcohol levels around 12.5%. Unlike many other natural wines, they are pure in their expression of grape and place. They have no hard acid or tannic edges, but they are lively and enticing
AND Vincent offers them at more-than-fair prices, below those of many cruder, less expressive Willamette or Californians.
White
2023 Vincent Pinot Blanc; Aroma: clean fine edge, spicy acidity, heady and ripe full; Mouth: rounded fresh intense bright and form, fleshy and pure, fine acid, long and complete; Very Good - Excellent $32; Case, $27
2023 Vincent Chardonnay Tardive
Vincent use Tardive, late in French , foir those better wiunes that spoecnd longer in barrel ; Aroma: heady and rich, very dense, light and spicy, savory, rich, entrancing, pure; Mouth: rich and soft, a light chicle note, clean and heady, light and long, fine acid Excellent $40; Case, $34
Red
Vincent Red Table Wine
In Burgundy Gamay and Pinot Noir are blended as a fuitier wine to enjoy earlier. This is 50-50
Aroma: heady ripe, and full, heady and bright clean, very pretty some deep notes; Mouth: sweet intense low toned, very finely delineated, clean, fine tannin, firm acid, dark tint, long; Very Good Plus $29.99; Case, $25.49
2023 Vincent Pinot Noir; Color: very light; Aroma: heady and savory aroma, very fresh, light but succulent with strawberry; Mouth: sweet berry ripe light and forward, nicely unobtrusive structure, light long very pretty fine Very Good - Excellent $32; Case, $27
2022 Vincent Pinot Noir Zenith Vineyard; Color: Very pretty, light orange cast; Aroma: ripe fresh, invasive, pretty, very pretty; Mouth: smooth, elegant, wood infected, clean tight acid, young, bright firm; Very Good - Excellent $64; Case, $54
Mix any twelve or more at their case prices.
Reds are in stock, Whites arrive next week.
Len Rothenberg
Order by phone at 617.367.8605, or reserve here: order@federalwine.com
Please pass this on to any friends who are wine enthusiasts!
- Len Rothenberg
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FREE DELIVERY!
downtown on orders more than $75;
in Greater Boston on orders more than $199
