richard@aplvax.UUCP (06/30/83)
I recently toured a small winery in Western Maryland that featured a number of novelty wines made from fruits and berries other than grapes. I tasted strawberry, cherry, elderberry, plum and even dandelion wines. Of these wines, the one made from Santa Rosa plums was by far my favorite, and quite delicious. It is rather fruity, but not sweet. This was my first experience with novelty wines, and I would appreciate hearing about others' experiences. I found some of the wines intriguing, and others not at all to my liking. Dandelion wine, for example, tasted rather weedy to me, as though I had plucked a dandelion out of the ground and started chewing on it. I would especially like to hear comments about plum wines, since I really love this one. (For those interested, the label is Berrywine, of Berrywine Plantations, Mt. Airy, Maryland.) Rich Greenberg
norskog@fortune.UUCP (07/02/83)
#R:aplvax:-14800:fortune:12400004:000:774 fortune!norskog Jul 1 14:29:00 1983 Inspired by my brother, a professional vintner, in high school I made quite a lot of fruit wines. (At the time I didn't like grape-based wines. I was a strange child.) The only one that I cared to drink was wild blackberry wine, which came out very close to a high-quality burgundy. The only blackberries that you can get in commercial quantities (3-4 pounds per gallon of finished wine) are not wild, but grown from bred varieties. These varieties were developed for eating, not making wine. I've never tasted a good commercial blackberry wine. Other fruit wines just don't have the complexity of flavor and character that grape wines possess. Lance Norskog Fortune Systems megatest!fortune!norskog hpda!fortune!norskog harpo!... sri-unix!... amd70!...