2023 Press Fraction Cabernet Franc Report – Part 1

The Best Wines from Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey

Editor’s Note: Because the full report is too long for some email services, I’ve divided it into three parts.

Today’s will cover the mechanics and goals of the tasting and the “Best of” and “Recommended” wines from the Maryland, Colorado/Michigan/Ohio, and New Jersey/Pennsylvania flights. I’ll publish the wines from New York on Wednesday, and on Friday, I’ll publish Virginia.

The 2023 Press Fraction Cabernet Franc Report

Panel Tasting Process & Notes

As with last year’s rosé panel tasting and report, I put together a small group of industry folks to taste with me — and then we had some folks drop out and fill in, resulting in this as our final panel:

• Allison Slute, Cab Franc Chronicles

• Carlo DeVito, writer, ex-winery owner, and interim winemaker at Unionville Vineyards

• Gabriella Macari, General Manager, Macari Vineyards and MW candidate (Note: the Macari family also hosted this tasting at their Meadowlark location but did not submit wine to be evaluated)

• Mikhail Lipyanskiy, Cork Report Media & Mikhail Lipyanskiy Photography

It was a perfect group to taste 70+ examples of East Coast cabernet franc with — experienced, thoughtful, critical at times, and excited by the good stuff.

I broke the wines down by region first, combining some regions if I only have a few wines from each one, then into flights of no more than six wines per flight. Where possible, the flights focused on a single vintage.

All told, we tasted through 14 flights. After each, we chose a favorite or two (if we didn’t all agree) that we thought worthy of being re-tasted as part of a championship round of sorts.

The goal wasn’t to publish a note about every single submitted wine. The goal was to find the most delicious examples of cabernet franc from eastern wine regions. We didn’t taste wines from every winery I would have wanted (a small handful of Finger Lakes wineries declined to participate), but we tasted more than 70 during the panel tasting. I tasted an additional 23 wines in the weeks following.

Ultimately, we couldn’t choose a single wine as our favorite. I think that speaks to the strength of the wines overall, though we tasted plenty of substandard wines too.

Some other notes:

• Price was not a consideration when deciding if a wine earned “Best of” or “Recommended.” Where appropriate, it was discussed below on a wine-by-wine basis.

• In the case of urban wineries, the winery's location dictated which category the wines are listed in below instead of the vineyard source(s).