Sleepy Hollow for Halloween!

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Headless Horseman

One morning back in 1957, I was alarmed awake by the sound of enormous overhead noise. I knew this was more than the usual dragging of chairs and clodding of hunting boots across the floorboards that were part of the morning ritual of our upstairs neighbors. My parents, baby sister and I (age 3), lived in a rickety two-story farmhouse in the Catskill Mountains, replete with chickens, goats and gutted deer hanging from the porch. But this enormous sound wasn’t Butchie, the teenage boy who relentlessly teased our basset hound, trekking to the outhouse: it was thunder rolling about the Hudson Valley. My Mom explained that it was Rip Van Winkle bowling with a vengeance, after his hundred years of sleep. It would be a couple of decades til I understood the thunder of balls rolling down the alley, laying pins in their weighty wake. Far, far sooner, I gathered there were as many tales as trolls in those legendering mountains.

One of my favorite Halloweenish tales is set in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow, in Tarrytown, NY, just down the Hudson River from where my folks moved in 1959. Legend has it that lanky schoolmaster Ichabod Crane was run out of town on a spooky eve by a headless horseman, supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper leftover from the Revolutionary War. However, one is left to suspect it was Brom Bones, the town rowdy, and Crane’s rival for the hand of a young lady, in persuasive disguise. I think of this tale every time I see a wine from Sleepy Hollow Vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands.

At about 600 acres, it’s one of the older plantings of chardonnay and pinot at the northern end of the Santa Lucias. Initially planted in 1972, Sleepy Hollow has undergone significant mods, decapitating varieties that fared poorly, like syrah and merlot, in favor of those that thrived. That would be chardonnay and pinot at a ratio of 3 to 2. Further refinements involve tuning Burgundian clonal selections to winemaker preference, resulting in the proliferation of ten different clones of pinot, accompanied by an increasing diversity of chardonnay, as the original Wente clones are bid adieu. Owned by Talbott Vineyards since 1994, prized Sleepy Hollow fruit is sold to many who don’t even attribute a vineyard on their label, (shame upon them!). Among those who do, you’ll find examples from Joullian, Arcadian, Pessagano, Fallbrook and Testarossa. And there are many more.

For Halloween, how about a tasting of a few Sleepy Hollow treats? Contrast the 05 Logan and 05 Case pinots from Talbott, and indulge in the creamy richness of the 07 Pessagno and 05 Talbott chardonnays. There shouldn’t be anything scary about these well-bred wines.

You’ll have to wait until Monday, November 2, though, for the latest release of 2006 Logan Pinot Sleepy Hollow. Ross Allen of Talbott Vineyards assures me it’s killer for $25. We’ll report next week.

Meanwhile, Happy Halloween! And tell me what wine you think goes best with candy corn: my bet is a Sleepy Hollow chardonnay from 2002: rich, creamy, mellow, and yellow.

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• ‘A Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ @ NYSTI, 10/20/09 (timesunion.com)

Tagged as: Halloween, Pessagno, Sleepy Hollow, Talbott, wine