Rare Vintage Blanc De Blancs Premium Champaign Charles Fournier S.E. mirror sign

Description

Rare Beautiful Vintage Blanc De Blancs Premium Champaign Charles Fournier S.E. mirror advertising sign.  Gold Seal  Vineyards, Finger Lakes, Hammondsport, New York.
21" WIDE X 15" HIGH.  This is excellent with minor frame dings.  Wood frame.  Ready to hang.  DUN 88 070821 36
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IN A N.Y. STATE OF MIND
By Craig GoldwynAugust 19, 1987
New York is the second-largest wine producing state. It is home to the oldest continuously operating winery in the U.S., and has a long and turbulent history that has taken a dramatic turn for the better in the last decade. If the brie and chablis crowd in the Hamptons ever discover what is happening in their own back yard, the new breed of New York wines could become as chic as Dove Bars.
The improvements in New York wines were especially evident at the New York Wine Classic, a statewide judging sponsored by the New York Wine Grape Foundation under the direction of International Wine Review magazine, and with cooperation from the New York State Department of Agriculture & Markets. It was held in late July at the Vista International Hotel in the World Trade Center in New York City.
History Wine making began in New York on Long Island, and some of the earliest vineyards in the U.S. were in a rural area now called Brooklyn. Vineyards spread to the Hudson Valley just north of Manhattan, into central New York's Finger Lakes, and along the shore of Lake Erie south of Buffalo.
For many decades New York was best known for making sweet concord wine, just a shot of alcohol away from being Welch's Grape Juice. Until 1952 the most promising development in the region was the arrival of the Champagne-born and bred Charles Fournier at Gold Seal Vineyards at repeal of Prohibition in 1935. In 1950 Fournier entered his blanc de blanc sparkling wine in the Sacramento State Fair and won first prize. The next year the fair limited entries to California wines only.
Then, in 1952, a Russian grape grower named Konstantin Frank landed in New York. After collecting enough money at his job in an automat he bought himself a ticket to Cornell University's state agricultural experiment station in Geneva, N.Y. There he announced that he was a viticultural expert and that he could grow vinifera grapes in New York state.
Vinifera grapes are the best wine grapes, and they are planted extensively in Europe and California. They include cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, pinot noir, riesling -- practically all the favorites. At the time New York had no commercial vinifera vineyards because Geneva had pronounced that they could not be commercially viable in the difficult climate and soil. As a result, Fournier was forced to make his award-winning wines from strongly flavored native grapes, like delaware, concord, catawba and niagara. And the established powers at Geneva responded to Frank's claim by handing him a hoe and pointing him to the blueberry patch.
One day, while pushing a broom through the hallways of the research labs, the dimunitive, craggy Frank bumped into the tall, slender, suave, Frenchman, Fournier. Frank, according to Fournier, poked him in the chest and asked, "You, Fournier, you winemaker at Gold Seal Winery? Why you no grow vinifera grapes?"
Fournier began to reply that he grew no vinifera because "Zee wintairs are too cold, and ... " when Frank interrupted and scoffed, "I come from Ukraine where winter's so cold, ven you make spit it freezes before it hits ground! I can grow vinifera in New York!" Fournier, whose sensitive French palate had never quite gotten used to the native varieties, was intrigued, and hired Frank.
The first challenge was to find a hardy rootstock that was resistent to lice and other problems in the soil. The two hopped into Fournier's red sports car, and headed for Canada where they collected wild grapevines from the woods and roadsides. They brought them back to Hammondsport, on the shores of Keuka Lake, a Y-shaped body of water in a chain of deep, loch-like glacial formations called the Finger Lakes in central New York.
There they planted the Canadian vines, catalogued them, propagated them, and began experiments in grafting vinifera to them.
Then, in the winter of 1957, while Fournier was in California visiting Almaden Vineyards (at the time Gold Seal's parent company), he got a frantic call from his wife, Mildred. "Charles, it is awful!" She cried. "You must come home immediately. It is so cold that pipes are bursting at the winery, and the roads are so icy no one can even get to the winery."
"Zat is wonderful," replied Fournier. "Wonderful?" echoed Mildred incredulously. "Yes, eet ees wonderful. Now we shall see eef Frank was right!"
Well, Frank was right, his grafted vines withstood one of the coldest winters on record, and in 1957 produced excellent, European-style wines. A new era in American winemaking was born.
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