I tried an interesting wine the other day, the 2006 Fortitude Rose from Napa Valley. Fortitude is a project developed from the winemaking team at Etude and since I’m a big fan of Etude, I just had to try it. According to their website, the project is about “celebrating the hard work of independent family grape growers. With small blocks that Etude founder, Tony Soter; winemaker, Jon Priest and viticulturist, Franci Ashton call “endangered” grape varietals – semillon, valdiguie (Napa gamay), charbono and carignane - Etude launched the Fortitude project.” The wine is a blend of 84% valdiguie, 8% carignane, 7% charbono and 1% zinfandel.
