HISTORY

Comtesse Thérèse has been producing wine commercially for seven vintages (2001 - 2007). Since 2001, fruit has been procured from other North Fork of Long Island vineyards and made into award-winning wines, along with grapes grown at the estate vineyard in Aquebouge. Total annual case production started in 2001 with 550 cases, growing to 1100 cases total for the 2007 vintage.

Starting in 2005, the first harvest from the Le Clos Thérèse estate vineyard in Aquebogue yielded about 300 cases of wine. In 2007, all the grapes for red wine, about 800 cases worth, were produced from the estate vineyard's grapes, and only white grapes were purchased from neighboring vineyards. In 2008, the first white grapes (chardonnay) are expected to be harvested from Le Clos Thérèse estate vineyard, and in future years, sauvignon blanc, malbec and syrah will also be harvested.

PREMIUM WINE GROUP

Starting in 2005, Comtesse Thérèse began making small quantities of hand-crafted wine at the estate vineyard in Aquebogue, New York. However, the majority of the winemaking is done at Premium Wine Group (PWG), the custom production facility in Mattituck, Long Island.

Established in 2000, PWG makes no wine of its own, but provides state-of-the-art facilities, equipment, and personnel for the making of fine wines by its clients, similar to the Napa Valley Wine Co.  It is the only such facility on the east coast of the US. PWG clients supply the grapes, yeasts, barrels, bottles, labels, and explicit winemaking instructions to PWG, which provides the labor, equipment and space.

Russell Hearn is the Director of PWG, which has seven full-time employees and 110 wine tanks. PWG processes over 900 tons of fruit into 60,000 cases annually for about 12 Long Island wineries and several upstate New York and New England wineries.

WINEMAKERS

Theresa Dilworth, home wine and beermaker for several years and self-taught in commercial winemaking, is Head Winemaker. Bernard Cannac, Lisa's husband, is the Consultant Winemaker. Lisa Julian Cannac, formerly Lab Director of Premium Wine Group, is Assistant Winemaker.

Bernard received his university degree from the University of Montpelier, an Oenology degree from the University of Bordeaux II, and an MBA in the International Commercialization of Wines and Spirits from the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Dijon.

 

Bernard's family owns vineyards in the south of France. Bernard has several years of experience working in his grandfather's vineyards, as well as Chateau Larmande in Saint-Emilion, Bordeaux. Upon arriving in the U.S., he worked at Jefferson Vineyards in Virginia, prior to coming to Long Island, where he was assistant winemaker at Osprey's Dominion Vineyards in Peconic and Winemaker at Galluccio Family Wineries in Cutchogue prior to joining Duck Walk in 2004.

WINEMAKING

As a general rule, the red wines undergo primary fermentation in stainless steel tanks. Indigenous, natural "wild" yeasts naturally occurring on the grape skins are used for primary fermentation. Cool temperatures are used for red wine fermentation.

Malolactic or secondary fermentation is also allowed to take place spontaneously, using the malolactic bacteria naturally present in the wine. The malolactic fermentation takes place in the steel tanks, and then the wines are moved to barrels for aging for six to 18 months. The red wine is not fined or filtered.

The chardonnay is 100% barrel-fermented in Russian and mixed Russian-French oak barrels using wild yeasts, and may undergo partial malolactic fermentation, depending on the vintage.

The rosé and the blanc de noir, made by the process of saignée, or bleeding off the clear juice from red grapes, are steel-fermented.

The type of barrels (oak species, forests, toasting levels, cooperage houses), length of barrel aging, frequency of racking, and other aging techniques vary according to variety and vintage. Comtesse Thérèse is one of the few wineries in the US to use Hungarian oak and Russian oak barrels, in addition to French oak and American oak, and is the first on the East Coast of the US to use Canadian oak barrels.