by stambrose | Feb 2, 2016 | Workshops
On Wednesday January 27, St Ambrose hosted our first Women’s Wellness Wednesday. We had a hearty house-made mushroom soup using smoked paprika served with crusty sourdough bread from Stone House Ovens as well as other delectables, paired with our divine meads and fine wines.
We demonstrated two different recipes for well-being featuring our own Sleeping Bear Farms raw honey. Rosehips & Honey Elixir, a syrup loaded with vitamin C and flavonoids, shown to reduce inflammation, boost immunity & help combat the winter blues, and Oatmeal Cookie Body Scrub, using honey, oats, vitamin E & coconut oil, sea salt, sugar & Ancient Healer essential oil from Creation Pharm for stimulating, nourishing & exfoliating dry winter skin.
The women left with warm bellies, big smiles, samples of the demos and goody bags.
Our next Women’s Wellness Wednesday will be held on February 10 from 6-8 pm. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we here at St Ambrose will be spreading the gospel of self-love.
We are ironing out the final details, but look for this event to be loaded with inspiration and decadence with a focus on Y-O-U! Gather your girlfriends & sisters and join us for sweet and savory flavor combinations of food, wine/mead, and oh, yes, there will be chocolate!
by stambrose | Jan 28, 2016 | Music
Bringing a message of positivity and light, Wink combines his percussive rhythm guitar and soulful voice to bring you to a new space in time. Dabbling in almost every musical genre, your sure to hear something you’ve loved for years, a well written and thought out original or a new cover song by a band you’ve never heard of, in an evening with Wink. Fronting the Traverse City based jam band, Soul Patch for the last 12 years, and counting, as well as playing solo, Wink is seasoned and poised to bring you on a little ride through his reality! All you have to do is show up and enjoy!
As usual, the show will kick off about 6 PM at the tasting room. No cover! Just show up, enjoy the beverages, and revel in some beautiful music.
by stambrose | Jan 20, 2016 | Wine
The weather outside is frightful, and that’s quite delightful for some .. including ice wine connoisseurs.
Ice wine? The heck is that?
You might be thinking about a glass of red that some barbarian dropped an ice cube into it, but we assure you, that’s incorrect.
Ice wine is a specialty wine that’s made from grapes which have frozen a bit while still on the vine. Normally you want to harvest your grapes (or anything, really) well before the frosts and ice start, but this is an exception.
The sugars of these grapes are not frozen, but the water in the grape is, which makes for a concentrated grape must to be extracted during the pressing process. The resulting wine ends up being heavily concentrated, almost “thick”, and very sweet.
The history of ice wine may trace all the way back to the Roman Empire, where it was written that some grape varieties were not harvested until the first frost. We don’t have any exact confirmation on the how and why – at least until we get a time machine – so we have to settle and say the first documented ice wine was likely created in Germany in the 1700s. The first extensively documented harvest of ice wine was in 1830, also in Germany. From these humble beginnings, the art of ice wine emerged.
Throughout its history, ice wine harvests have been relatively rare and difficult. To produce ice wine, one must be ready to harvest grapes at the first opportunity and get to work – requiring prep and planning for an event that may not happen. While lucky folks like us in Northern Michigan and our Canadian friends can count on winter coming at some point, the perfect conditions for ice wine (and the grapes required) don’t always lineup, even here.
To count as an ice wine by regulations, the grapes need to go through a “hard freeze”, while on the vine, after they are ripe. Freezing after harvest, light frosts, and such do not count. For a good ice wine crop, one needs the freeze to arrive before the grapes have rotted too much, and the freeze must be hard, but not so severe that it is impossible to extract the juices. It’s a slippery business. While waiting for these “just-right” conditions, one must also protect the grapes from wild animals and other forces of nature.
So, the freeze happens, everything is great, now what?
The grapes need to be harvested practically immediately. Then they need to pressed, while still frozen. This means a long day and night for the workers, between harvesting and then working to press the precious ice grapes in an environment where they stay frozen. Sound cozy?
After pressing, patience takes over. Ice wine does not ferment as quickly as other wines. The erratic nature of the harvest, difficulties of the harvest, and long fermentation add up to a wine that tends to hit you in the wallet a bit harder than some other varieties.
Our foray into the ice wine world is Frost Song. This dry ice wine brings together some interesting flavors – peach pie, pears, and raisins, for instance – for a unique tasting experience. We recommend that you pair it with a hard cheese.
Our Late Harvest wines are similar to ice wine, but not quite the same. Late Harvest wines do not have the same exacting specifications as a true ice wine, but are similar in their profile. It’s a story for a different time…
by stambrose | Jan 18, 2016 | Mead
The humble raspberry. A staple of the fresh fruit section of your local produce aisle, a common added-flavor for juices, candies, gum, and more the world over. Packed with antioxidants, brimming with flavor, bursting with beautiful color. We’ve all enjoyed them in one form or another. With Razz!, you can enjoy them in a bottle. With honey. And alcohol.
St. Ambrose Cellars has a long history with the raspberry. Our first batch of mead – Razzmatazz – was developed when a batch of our delicious raspberry honey creme didn’t quite turn out right. Instead of tossing it, we decided to make some mead. It was delicious, and the meadery was born.
Razzmatazz remains a favorite in our lineup today, but today we’re talking about it’s close relative – Razz!. Razz! is a lightly carbonated mead, and a member of our new bottled draft mead lineup.
Razz is a form of melomel. Melomels are meads that also have fruit. Razz is a simple combination – we take our honey, we take our raspberry, and we mix it all together for one great bottle of mead.
For Razz, we add a bit of carbonation and produce the 6% ABV draft mead. For Razzmatazz, we skip the carbonation and produce a still mead – one that turns out more in the 12% ABV range and sits along with Dancing Bare Ambrosia and Tupelo Ambrosia on the shelves.
Both of our raspberry meads are great performers with our customers – garnering over 3.7 star ratings on Untappd and regularly shipping out of the tasting room home with someone. We’re excited to bring you Razz! in bottled form now, and please look for it in your local stores as well!
