Earlier this month I noticed, along with another reader of ErieBlogs, that the Penn Stater magazine featured an article about Doug Moorhead of Presque Isle Wine Cellars in Northeast, Pa. It’s a great read about PI Wine Cellars and wine making in Pennsylvania.  Doug is credited for starting one of the first two wineries in Pennsylvania (there now are over 120 in the state). Kick-up your feet during lunch or read it over breakfast this weekend.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:

It’s a joke. It has to be.

Here, at the most prestigious restaurant in Pennsylvania-Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia-is a 2006 Pinot Gris. That’s not the funny part. A Pinot Gris certainly belongs here, on this famed wine list of classic French wines, served in a dining room that looks like a Manet painting, with crystal chandeliers and waiters who literally announce “Voilà!” as they serve meals of roasted squab breast and leg confit that can run (with wine, of course) upwards of $200 a pop.

But this Pinot Gris? It’s not from Alsace. Or the Loire Valley. Or even California. No, this Pinot Gris is from Pennsylvania, from grapes picked a few miles from Lake Erie and pressed at a little winery there called Presque Isle Wine Cellars.

Which is why it must be a joke. The only grapes that grow well in that corner of the state are Concords and Niagaras, right? Grape-juice grapes. (It’s no wonder Welch’s largest manufacturing plant is right down the road.) Wines made there are the kinds that teenagers sneak into the prom, that great-aunts serve with meatloaf, that people who drink White Zinfandel make fun of. Nobody takes those wines seriously. Who really takes any Pennsylvania wines seriously? A Philadelphia Inquirer wine columnist once described the state’s wines, collectively, as “painful to drink.”

To read the entire article, please click here [PDF].   The article was written by Vicki Glembocki, who grew up in Erie, and is now a freelance writer in Philadelphia.

My thanks to the Penn Stater magazine for being so amicable and allowing us to republish the article here.  This Penn State alumnus enjoyed it and I’m sure the readers of ErieBlogs will too.