Drinker’s Blog
Friday, January 6, 2012
The west and especially northern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula, where the best grape growing happens, is also
They grow their own cherries at Peninsula Cellars.
home to the state’s best cherry farming, so it’s pretty normal for the state’s earliest winemakers to have backgrounds in cherries.
Many have cherry orchards growing next to their vineyards.
Such is the case with Peninsula Cellars, a winery near Traverse City, Michigan that’s owned and operated by one of the tart cherry industry’s most famous pioneer families: the Kroupas.
John Kroupa started farming fruit on Old Mission Peninsula — a finger of hilly glacial-cut land that extends out into Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay — during the Civil War. These days, the winery and cherry orchards are run by his great-great grandson — who also happens to be named John Kroupa.
Peninsula Cellars makes some great wine, including the Rieslings Michigan is becoming known for — Time Magazine recently lauded their Select Riesling, for example. Of course it would be nothing short of bizarre if Peninsula Cellars did not also make and bottle their own cherry wine, and they now have both of their bottles featured here on cherry wine dot com.
One is a modestly sweet blend of black Ulster and tart red Montmorency cherries called Hot Rod that the winery sells for $11.99. It gets its name from having a higher-than-normal alcohol content, at 13.5%.
Peninsula Cellars' 1896 one-room school house tasting room.
The other is a fine, port-style dessert wine called Melange that blends Ulsters and grape brandy that sells for $17.99. It’s perfect for cold weather sipping on dark January nights.
All the cherries, of course, come from the Kroupa’s own orchards.
Peninsula Cellars ships to eight states: California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. If you live in one of these states, or know someone who does, order from the winery by emailing their tasting room manager at tom@peninsulacellars.com.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Eleanor and Albert Leger.
We’re very pleased to bring Eden Ice Cider‘s unique line of “ice ciders” into the Cherry wine dot com family.
Albert and Eleanor Leger, the founders of Eden Ice Cider, are hard cider-dessert wine-apple specialists in hilly northern Vermont.
And their five fascinating products, which are winning awards at an almost alarming pace, span the boundaries of what we think we know about wine classifications.
Allow me to explain.
The Leger’s “ice ciders” combine characteristics of hard
Melting the concentrate.
cider, apple wine, ice wine, and dessert wine. And in case that description is not loose enough, their newest product, Orleans, is not a dessert wine at all, but a high-alcohol dry apple wine made in collaboration with maître liquoriste Deirdre Heekin, that’s flavored with organic herbs.
Albert, a French Canadian, follows Quebecois custom for making ice cider, which are similar to the German rules about what makes a traditional Riesling ice wine an authentic product. That is, in part, pressing your own apples and freezing/thawing the juice outdoors.
Eve would approve.
Other than pure creativity and lots of going of the extra mile, another common denominator running through these products are the inputs: fresh Vermont apples, many from their own orchard of 800 trees.
Some of the Leger’s ice ciders are varietal — the Northern Spy and the Honeycrisp, while others are blends. The Leger’s make Windfall Orchard Ice Cider from the fresh juice of, and I am not kidding here, 30 different varieties of apple.
Their ice cider business has grown fast since 2007, and they now have good retail distribution in New York, Massachusetts and Vermont. But luckily, they can ship their wines to several states along the northern eastern seaboard and as far afield as Florida, Colorado and California.
Free shipping on orders of 6 bottles or more.
—Todd
Thursday, December 1, 2011
The inventory here at Cherry wine dot com is growing, giving you more hard-to-find fruit wines, hard cider and honey wines to choose from for direct shipment in time for the holidays.
Our latest addition is Flathead Lake Winery from Columbia Falls, Montana. The winemaker there, Paddy Fleming, hand makes a variety of fruit wines including a cherry wine, a rare white cherry wine, a cherry-pinot noir blend, a mirabelle plum wine and a huckleberry wine.
Flathead’s huckleberry wine, called Glacier Park Wild Huckleberry Wine, is the only 100% huckleberry wine sold in the United States.
If there are any bears on your Christmas shopping list, this is no-brainer. And a fair warning, drinking this 
wine on a picnic in a national forest is a a recipe for excitement since bears can smell huckleberries from 50 miles away.
Though, it is interesting that lodges on the premises of Glacier National Park serve up Paddy’s wild huckleberry wine to hikers and guests.
—Todd
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Hi,
A few of the wineries represented here on Cherry wine dot com are having special holiday sales and/or some once-a-year Black Friday/Cyber Momday special pricing on their fruit wines.
Black Friday, which is this week, is not just for big box stores. Nope. The little guy can bring his prices down too, just in time for holiday gift giving.
Bart over at China Bend Winery in Washington makes organic, no-sulfite-added fruit wine gems and is offering 25% off case orders (12 bottles, mix and match) and 15% off half-case orders through the end of November.
Let me tell you a little story. My Mom and Dad (bless ‘em), ordered bottles of Bart’s amazing cherry port the day we launched the site in late September. And they loved it. Bart had sent me a couple of bottles to try (yes, it’s amazing) and I gave one to my parents, who live close by, and they were very excited to get their hands on more of it.
Check out China Bend’s grape wines, too, if you’re a fan of low sulfites, organic grapes, and boutique craftsmanship.
Other wineries who make fruit wines you cannot find in stores have offered teases about online shipping deals they’ll be announcing soon, so I’ll update this post as they’re announced.
—Todd
Update 2:39pm, Nov. 23: Montezuma Winery is reporting a nice Cyber Monday deal. This Finger Lakes (NY) fruit wine and honey wine producer is giving online-only buyers free shipping on orders of six or more bottles, from 8am until noon only, Eastern Time. Excludes shipments to Alaska and Hawaii. Montezuma says online orders Monday morning will not reflect the discount, but that shipping charges will be deducted automatically on your credit card charge. Offer valid for online purchases only.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Adytum Cellars makes some of the country's most expensive honey wines.
Cherry wine dot com welcomes its third Washington winery, Adytum Cellars, to the site, along with its list of 12 high-end (and not cheap) hand made artisan honey wines.
Located in the south central part of the state, the winery has been slowly and steadily growing since 2002, and now makes its lineup of fine meads available to 37 states and the District of Columbia via direct shipping. But its list of honey wines — including 100% honey wines, fruit-based honey wines like plum, and exotic styles like elderflower — are otherwise available only in the Seattle area and a few retail locations scattered throughout Washington state.
Owner and winemaker Vince Carlson has been a beekeeper since he was fifteen years old, and knows a thing or two about honey as well as winemaking, and takes a nature-first approach to his craft:
Each year, Vince travels the Northwest visiting orchards and farms searching for the most striking and flavorful flowers, fruit and berries of the season. “I never know from year to year what kind of mead I will be making,” he says. “In one year peaches are best; another year it might be cherries or pears. The fruit trees and berry bushes decide what will make the best mead of the year.”
Vince is a cool guy with lots of energy and a unique sense of intellectual curiosity, and he’s excited that visitors to this site, such as yourself, will have a chance to discover his honey wine. And of course we’re excited to have some of mead’s most high-end price tag wines represented here.
Welcome to Vince, and welcome to you… feel free to see what Adytum Cellars has been doing with honey, yeast, fruit and wild flowers in the small, Yakima Valley town of Zillah, Washington for almost ten years now. Just click on the honey wine search to get started.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Welcome to Cherry wine dot com’s Drinker’s Blog, where fans of fruit wine, honey wine, hard ciders and exotics keep up with the latest in the non-grape wine universe.
Whether you’re curious about old-fashioned country wine, the people making it professionally or even how to make it yourself, then you’ve found the right place.
Cherry wine dot com — and this blog —started because millions of Americans are fans of non-grape wines & liquors and hard ciders and half of them don’t even know it yet.
Fruit wine fans and curious would-be drinkers range in age from 21 to 121, are composed of all ethnicities and live in every corner of America from small towns to the Big Apple.
Some fruit wine fans don’t even consider themselves “wine drinkers” in the traditional sense but like the taste of fruit wines, which are more familiar tasting and can be found in sweeter versions than grape wines generally are.
Others, me included, are regular red and white wine drinkers who also love the adventure, romance and rural tradition that non-grape wines offer, no matter if they’re sweet as pie, dry as a bone or somewhere in-between.
I love a good Cabernet but for me, nothing says “spring” like a wine made from field-fresh strawberries or freshly cut rhubarb. Nothing says, “autumn” like a hard apple cider. Nothing tastes more like summer than a peach, blackberry or dandelion wine, and nothing warms up a dark, freezing January evening exactly like a smoky port distilled from summer berries or orchard fruit.
Grape wines simply do not have the same connections to the seasons. Or to regions of the country:
No variety of grape wine says “the South” the way a peach or persimmon wine does. Nothing says “Midwest” more than an apple wine or pumpkin. Nothing says “New England” like a cranberry wine. Nothing says “the North” like a chokecherry or thimbleberry. And nothing says “West Coast” like a huckleberry, boysenberry or fig wine.
I know that there will be more than a few people excited by the idea of this site, especially since non-grape wines are so hard to find. There are 6,400 wineries in the United States, yet there are only 700 that make non-grape wine. That’s only one-out-of-ten wineries, and those tend to be smaller, privately owned entities off the radar of corporate distributors.
But just because you can’t find a dry raspberry, organic hard cider, sparkling rhubarb or pear eau de vie at a store, doesn’t mean you can’t buy it. Because you probably can.
On Cherry wine dot com you will find search functions for every style and variety of non-grape wine, hard cider and liquor. Each search will give you a list of products that are legally shippable to the state of your choice. When you find a wine that you want listed on Cherry wine dot com as shipping to your state, follow the ordering instructions listed on the wine’s page for that particular winemaker and the winery will ship it to you via UPS or Fed Ex in about a week (unless you decide to pay extra for next-day or two-day shipping).
Let the adventure begin. There’s a world of taste out there ready to be explored. Cheers.
—Todd Spencer
Todd Spencer is the founder of Fruit Wine Media, LLC and editor of Cherry wine dot com. He’s written for Wines & Vines and Wine Business Monthly, and contributed articles to national publications and national radio about everything from the importance of local economies to donuts to global warming and music. He’s a longtime magazine editor and advertising agency proofreader in San Francisco and his native Michigan. He discovered cherry wine in college and counts that and other fruit-based wines and liquors as among his favorites.
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