At Mural City Cellars’ Frankford Avenue wine garden, come for the frosé, stay for the skin-contact pinot gris
Mural City Cellars makes skin-contact wines that sell well every year, but nothing tops the frozen rosé at its summertime wine garden.
In a city teeming with beer gardens, how does a wine garden stand out? With a touch of class.
An air of elegance was subtle but present on a recent Friday night visit to Mural City Cellars’ wine garden at 2211 Frankford Ave. A violin-keyboard duo played upbeat classical tunes as parents sat and stood around picnic tables, calmly juggling babies, overseeing toddlers, and sipping pet-nat blanc and merlot from clear plastic cups. A golf clap broke out at the end of each song, and a small queue formed in front of the antique SEPTA trolley car-turned-bar.
This is as lovely a setting as any to sample Mural City’s recently released skin-contact pinot gris ($11 a glass, $30 a bottle), a bright, fruit-forward wine that’ll linger with you long after you’ve left the wine garden.
Mural City owners Nicholas Ducos and Francesca Galarus handpicked the grapes at West Chester’s Stag & Thistle Farm for this 2022 vintage. They brought them back to their Kensington winery, where they crushed them into a temperature-controlled stainless steel tank, letting the grape skins sit with the juice for five days before separating them. Not only do the tannic grape skins give this otherwise white wine a deep pink hue, they also impart fuller body than you’d find in a typical pinot gris.
This is a method familiar to the two-year-old winery, and there’s one aspect Ducos zeroes in on when tasting the grape must as it sits: texture.
“What I do is I would taste the tank two times, [in the morning and at night], and I’m gonna do it every day until I feel like we have enough texture,” Ducos says. “It’s not going to gain texture once you pull it off the skins, and aromatics change as fermentation happens.”
Once the texture is there — Ducos characterizes this particular pinot gris as “slightly grippy” and “well-balanced” — they drain the liquid from the tank, press out the remaining juice from the grape must left behind, and blend it back together with the other juice. The wine finishes fermenting in about a month, then ages in a stainless steel tank for several months (in this case, eight) before being run through a coarse filter and bottled.
Mural City made 220 cases of the citrusy, slightly mineral pinot gris last year. It’s been selling well at the wine garden since its July release. “Orange wines in our market over here do really, really well,” Ducos says, but nothing tops the garden’s best-selling frosé, or frozen rosé.
“The frose’s cool, too,” Ducos says, explaining that most places make frosé with a concentrated base that’s mixed with water and wine or vodka. Mural City doctors its own rosé with a little sweetener and water “just to make sure it freezes,” he says. “Ours is truly a wine-based product.”
Find Mural City Cellars at 2211 Frankford Ave. on weekends through mid-October. After that, it’s moving to a new, larger space at 1831 Frankford Ave. Opening date TBD. Buy wine through its website or in bottle shops like Di Bruno Bros. and Bloomsday’s Fancy Wine Shop.