Turning Apples – and Berries and Peaches and Maple Syrup – Into Wine

blueberrywineI know nothing about regular wine. I spent much of my adult life fighting off allergies that came to a head while I lived in a house with a serious but unknown mold problem. Wine – red or white – killed me. Besides the inevitable headaches (migraines, really), I’d also become slightly anaphylactic – getting stuffed up and uncomfortable.

A relative turned me on to blueberry wine from down east. Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia all have wineries that make various styles of blueberry wine, and where the grape-based wines made me all kinds of miserable, it turns out that wine from other fruits does not contain the histamines present in grape wines, and I could drink to my heart’s content.

Except that the availability of fruit wines in the LCBO is minimal with only about a half dozen on offer – mostly dessert wines – and often only seasonally. So when I discovered that the Ontario Wine Society was hosting an event that featured non VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance) eligible products, and that most of the offerings were fruit wines, I was happy to fill in for our resident wine expert Sasha Grigorieva and do some sampling myself.

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