Forget blue wine and orange wine: fruit wine is the new colorful beverage of the moment.
Earlier this summer, the Internet went abuzz with the news of Gik , a psychedelic blue wine dyed with organic pigments to glow like an azure lava lamp. Unless Tang is your dinner pairing of choice, the unnatural hue is not incredibly appealing to an adult palate.
Though the excitement of blue wine may have just been about finding something new, breaking out from wine’s traditional red, white and pink varieties, a rainbow of different colored wines dates back to winemaking’s origins: Fruit wine.
Fermented at home and produced at wineries around America, wines in hues of blue, purple, gold, magenta and more, all sourced from different fruits, are the unrecognized champions of the colorful wine world. Common in regions where grapes are not as plentiful as California or the South of France, fruit wines offer a sustainable, tasty way to make local booze.
Bear Creek Wine in Alaska, purchases berries, which are not cultivated on a commercial scale, by the pound from community members.
“Grapes won’t make it though the winter up here, so we’ll use what’s in the garden and nearby,” explained winemaker Louis Maurer. He notes that people really enjoy his ten-year old winery’s fruit wines, though “everyone wants to compare them to grape wines.”
“But making a fruit wine into a grape wine isn’t a fair thing to do,” he said. “Of course it doesn’t taste like a Cabernet—it’s made from raspberries!”
Like many fruit winemakers, Maurer started making wine with his father-in-law as a hobby and eventually grew their winemaking to gain a professional license and open a tasting room.
Bob Manley, co-founder of New Hampshire’s Hermit Woods Winery with partner and winemaker Ken Hardcastle, decided to go commercial in 2010. “We were making more wine than the feds want home winemakers to make,” Manley joked. But after spending substantial amounts of time, money and space on this hobby “it started to not make sense to take this to another level.”
“Anyone who gets in the wine business to make money in this part of the world is barking up the wrong tree,” Manley added. Meanwhile, their production has increased from 1000 cases at the start of the project to 2500 cases of wine each year, all created from local fruits grown in New England. To keep money in the community, Hermit Woods only sells at local businesses, purposefully avoiding big supermarkets or liquor stores.
Hardcastle, a fan of wines ranging from Pinot Noir to Burgundy, said he uses naturally wild fruits to craft dry wines, reminiscent of Malbec or Cabernet in his fruit blends. “Blueberry is a fantastic fruit,” he said. “There’s great structure in the skins, beautiful juice and characteristics that lend itself to making a really fine wine.”
Served chilled, Hermit Wood’s Petite Blue, which contains an entire pound of blueberries per bottle, is a fantastic summer refresher, crisp enough to break a heat spell but still dry enough to be reminiscent of classic red wines.
Fruit wines can also be a stepping-stone into the often overwhelming world of wine drinking.
“It’s fun to see younger folks coming in with an interest in wine that seems greater than when I was that age,” Hardcastle said. He sees a willingness and openness to understand wine with younger generation, and says fruit wine is a good cross-over beverage for beer drinkers and hard cider imbibers.
While the practice of making fruit wine has always been popular in areas without grapes or access to wine, the fruit wine industry is only a few decades old. Easily made at home, fruit wine still has not caught on in popularity like the craft beer and home brewing movement, though Hardcastle noted that there a lot more beer drinkers than wine drinkers in America.
In Michigan, Round Barn Winery makes wine from anything that grows locally: peaches, pears, plums, berries and beyond.
“Not a lot of people make fruit wines and people who don’t normally drink them are surprised,” said winemaker Matthew Moersch. “It’s good for first-timers and people who are newer to wines, as their palate progresses they may stay into fruit wines.”
He said people are usually really impressed with the quality of his fruit wines, but he knows they’re not taken as seriously as traditional wines from say, California.
“We’re more fun,” he said, “A master sommelier isn’t going to say ‘Oh, give me that blueberry wine’… we like to make what the people like and change things up.”
He says the fruit wine trend may grow with marketing. “A movie like Sideways may need to happen,” he said, for the fruit wine boom to happen.
Despite excitement for Gik’s gimmicky blue product, fruit wine has yet to go viral. The small-scale, local nature of many fruit wineries may keep fruit wine on the DL for now, but those who visit fruit wine regions can’t get enough. Many winemakers cited tourists making up their largest customer base, though shipping restrictions in various states make selling wine online tricky for some.
Skeptical? Just try sip of blueberry wine, and you may soon be in line for your own online orders of the stuff.
