Fruit wines don’t get nearly as much publicity nor anywhere near as many accolades as their dry counterparts. You won’t find pictures of them on the cover of any national wine magazine or read long expository reviews from a sommelier about their flavors or mouthfeel.
Still, they are plentiful, both around Pennsylvania and in other sections of the country, their releases timed to the late spring and summer months. For whatever they lack in national or even local recognition, they make up for it in the large number of fans who purchase and consume them year-round.
Some but not all of the wine competitions include fruit wine as a category; you’re more likely to see that in a state competition than a regional or national one. Here are several of the recent winners from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland.
Pennsylvania
2020 Pennsylvania Wine Competition, best fruit wine
Conneaut Cellars Winery, NV Red Raspberry
2020 Pennsylvania Farm Show, best fruit wine
Armstrong Valley Winery, 2018 Blackberry Merlot
2019 Pennsylvania Wine Competition, best fruit wine
Arsenal Cider House & Wine Cellars, 2018 Red Raspberry
2019 Pennsylvania Farm Show, best fruit wine
Heritage Wine Cellars, NV Blackberry
New Jersey
2018 New Jersey Wine competition, Beverage Testing Institute, best fruit wines
94 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Cranberry Wine 4% rs. $12.95/500 ml Gold Medal & Best Buy—2018 Best New Jersey Fruit Wine
93 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Red Raspberry Wine 6.5% rs. $12.95/500 ml Gold Medal & Best Buy
92 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Red Raspberry Moscato 6.5% rs. $13.95 Gold Medal & Best Buy
92 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Cranberry Moscato 4% rs. $13.95/500 ml Gold Medal & Best Buy
91 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Blueberry Wine 4% rs. $12.95/500 ml Gold Medal & Best Buy
90 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Cherry Moscato 6% rs. $13.95 Gold Medal & Best Buy
89 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Cherry Wine 6% rs. $12.95/500 ml Silver Medal & Best Buy
88 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Pomegranate Wine 4% rs. $12.95/500 ml Silver Medal & Best Buy
88 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Blueberry Moscato 5% rs. $13.95 Silver Medal & Best Buy
88 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Blackberry Moscato, New Jersey 10.6% rs. $13.95 Silver Medal
88 • Auburn Road (NJ) NV Give Peach A Chance Peach Wine, New Jersey. $12 Silver Medal & Best Buy
86 • Tomasello (NJ) NV Blueberry Forte 5% rs. $12.95/375 ml Silver Medal & Best Buy
86 • Auburn Road (NJ) NV Apple Wine, New Jersey. $13 Silver Medal & Best Buy
Maryland
2019 Governor’s Cup Competition
Dove Valley Winery • Perky Peaches NV, best fruit wine
2019 Maryland Comptroller’s Cup Competition
Red Heifer Winery • Blueberry NV, best fruit wine
2018 Governor’s Cup Competition
Great Shoals Winery • Hard Strawberry 2018, best fruit wine
2018 Maryland Comptroller’s Cup Competition
Layton’s Chance Vineyard & Winery • BoBerry Strawberry Wine 2017 (Dorchester Co.), best fruit wine
So what makes an excellent fruit wine that stands out among all the variations of techniques and varieties of fruit?
Kevin Ford, the owner and operator of Red Heifer Winery in Smithsburg, in Washington County, says a good fruit wine should stand on its own as well as any grape wine without being cloyingly sweet unless that sweetness complements the other tasting notes. The western Maryland winery sits at an elevation of 1,500 feet on a property that at one time was home to the Naylor Peach Orchards. It opened in 2012.
“The way I explain sweetness to customers is that just like a pepper spice in a chili. The burn should complement the flavor and not be the flavor,” he says, adding that he uses a panel of consumers and a blind tasting to find his “winemaking parameter goals” for products like his award-winning blueberry wine. “When you eat blueberries you are initially greeted by that familiar sweet and unquestionably identifiable taste to be followed up with the tart tang from the skins of the berry. Whenever possible I try to source local Maryland fruit and have plans to eventually grow our own blueberries as an added crop to our current grapevines.”
Seven Mountains Wine Cellars is located in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania, a couple of minutes off Route 322 and a half-hour east of State College.
Currently, he says, he sources blueberries from several surrounding states, including Pennsylvania.
Scott Bubb is a longtime winemaker in Centre County, about a half-hour east of State College. He started making wine in 1976, which ultimately led to he and his wife Mary Ann opening Seven Mountains Wine Cellars in 2008. His list of more than 40 wines includes Pennsylvania Farm Show Governor’s Cup winners in both the dry and fruit categories, something that hadn’t been done in the history of the competition.
Bubb says you can judge a quality fruit wine by the answer to a simple question: Does the finished wine taste like the fresh fruit itself? “I believe you accomplish this by making the amount of sugar in the finished wine the same as what the fruit had as natural sugar in its raw state.”
He explains that by what he does with blueberries, which he said contain around 9 brix, or sugar content, in their juice. That amounts to about 5 percent alcohol.
“So we add enough sugar to get that up to 20.5 brix. which will then make the alcohol level somewhere around 12 percent, he says. “All this sugar, both what we added as well as the natural sugar, gets converted into alcohol, leaving us with a wine that has zero sugar. After many months of stabilizing and filtering it’s time to balance the wine prior to bottling. We are balancing the sugar with the acidity. It is my strong belief that when we add enough balancing sugar as to match what the fresh fruit had in the beginning that the wine will taste more like the fresh fruit.”
Fresh fruit contains sugar for a reason, he says. They taste better that way. “Some fruit like cranberries, blackberries and raspberries are very acidic, therefore those wines need to be sweeter in order to achieve proper balance.”
The process of making these isn’t much different than most wines in terms of needing the fruit to ferment and then develop into a tasty drink. Blueberries, for instance, aren’t picked off a plant in July and then crushed and put into a bottle for sale. Rather, the entire cycle will take the better part of a year.
“Blueberries are different in that they naturally contain a yeast inhibitor often added to a grape wine when it is done fermentation to maintain sweetness,” Ford says. “Thus fermenting blueberries requires more temperature control, additional yeast nutrients, and most importantly patience. We also make a wonderful peach wine using local peaches that is a more challenging process-wise to make than some of our finest dry red wines. Grapes want to be made into wine while other fruits can be encouraged sometimes reluctantly into making something of themselves with great results.”
Red Heifer Winery in Smithsburg, Maryland, is open Wednesdays through Sundays. There is plenty of outside seating to meet the COVID-19 requirements for social distancing.
For Bubb, the biggest challenge sometimes is extracting the juice from the fruit. “Some fruits are very high in pectin. And this makes it difficult,” he says. “Take strawberries, for example. If you took a fresh strawberry in your hand and squeezed the juices out you are probably not going to get much juice. We will add special enzymes after crushing everything that will break down this pectin and basically turn all that pulp or solid part that you now have squished in your hand all to liquid, which increases the yield greatly.
“After the fermentation is complete there is nothing left that remotely looks like a strawberry. From this point, the process is basically the same.”
While this is the height of fruit picking season, which begins in late May with strawberries and continues through the summer with the harvesting of blueberries, cherries and peaches among others, the selling season for fruit wine has extended through the entire calendar, with a few exceptions. “We do offer a few as seasonal only. like cranberry and spiced apple,” Bubb says. “The cranberry is best for the holiday season and the spiced apple served warm will get you through January and February.
“[But] there is a time and a place for [all of them],” he adds. “Just like how that dry red wine can make a steak dinner fabulous. A glass of fruit wine with dessert or even as a dessert by itself can be very satisfying,” he said.
Charlie Tomasello at his namesake winery in southern New Jersey might sell as many fruit wine variations as anyone on the East Coast, with a long list of fruit wines (blueberry, blackberry, red raspberry, pomegranate, cranberry, cherry), variations off those (sparkling blueberry and blueberry forte port wine) and a similar length of beverages that blend the juices from the fruits with Moscato grapes (including grapefruit, salted caramel, tangerine, huckleberry and peach along with many of those mentioned above). Generally semisweet, all are recommended to be served chilled.
“They have evolved into a pretty big chunk of our business,” Tomasello says of the Moscato blends, which the winery has been making for the past several years. He discovered what ultimately became the winery’s new line while visiting a distributor in Virginia. He came across a bottle of peach Moscato in a grocery store, made in Italy. “In a Champagne bottle, and it had a lot of effervescence,” he said. “More like a Champagne with fruit in it. I thought it was phenomenal.”
That Moscato blend evolved into the present line, with a mix of fruits that customers are picking up or ordering from January to December. “We found they were an absolutely delightful drink,” producing a slight fizz but little buzz at slightly less than 7 percent alcohol.
Tomasello Winery's lineup of products includes a number of straight-up fruit wines and also Moscato blends. The South Jersey-based winery has 10 locations. Its first vineyard was planted in 1888, and the winery opened to the public in 1933.
“They became everyday wines for the consumer as opposed to dessert wines,” he says. “That created a much bigger niche than just the fruit wine market.”
Indeed, they add to the growing varieties of products that are appealing to a market looking for new tastes and mixtures to explore. Bottom line, they satisfy customers’ interests while adding to a winery’s cash flow.
Maybe someday, Ford says, they’ll also gain a little more respect than they tend to do now.
“I feel that negative attitudes toward fruit or sweeter wines are bizarre if compared to a chef’s offerings,” he says. “A pastry chef makes sweets and is generally treated as seriously as their entree-focused counterpart. I personally make more dry wines than sweet or fruit wine and treat them all as equals during the winemaking process. Our blueberry pairs extremely well with a brie or goat cheese in addition to our winery charcuterie boards.”
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