Artisan winemaking turns fruitful

Florida vintners lead the way in creating refined wines from a variety of fruits.

By Chris Sherman, Times Staff Writer
Published November 18, 2007

To put a taste of Florida's latest and most creative harvest on your Thanksgiving table, pour everyone a glass of fruit wine.

If the wine is tangerine, carambola, blueberries or strawberries, it may be a Florida crop. The modern smarts that turn citrus and berries into sophisticated, even dry, wines are homegrown too.

Winemakers around Tampa Bay who don't have vineyards full of fancy wine grapes have picked a fruit basket of wine from orchards, groves and berry patches instead.

Though fruit wine was a novelty product in Florida and the grape-unfriendly frozen North for years, new vintages have a wider range of flavors and styles.

Winemakers in South Pasadena, Plant City, Fort Myers and Homestead have taken the lead. They squeeze blackberries, grapefruit, oranges, key limes, even tomatoes and that gets lowly fruit wine new respect. And higher prices. Today's fruit wines are often around $15 a bottle, though you may have to go to the wineries to buy them.

"There are more and more good fruit wines today," says Chase Marden, who makes blueberry wines and other at Keel & Curley Winery in Plant City (www.keelandcurleywinery.com; (813 752-9100).

The fruit wine alchemists use modern technology to balance acids, sugars and tannins from citrus, berries and tropical fruits as carefully as wine grapes.

Much more carefully, contends Vince Shook. His family's Florida Orange Groves and Winery in South Pasadena (www.floridawine.com; toll-free 1-800-338-7923) pioneered and now leads the fruit wine revival with 20 stores around Florida.

"It's more challenging" to make wine from fruit, Shook says. Not only is the chemistry different, but mangoes and strawberries cost more than grapes.

Fruit wines are artisan products made with whole fruit or puree, handmade in small batches and sometimes barrel-aged. That's not the bulk swill made years ago from leftover orange pulp.

They are not sickly sweet or puckeringly bone dry as wine snobs love to say. They have a pleasant range from dry and off-dry to dessert sweet, and always a jam jar of real fruit flavors.

They are as friendly for several generations of the family at a holiday dinner as granddad's elderberry wine, which Manischewitz still makes. Citrus and tropical whites and berry reds are happy at Thanksgiving with cinnamon sweet potatoes, cranberries, pumpkin pie and turkey stuffed with apples and pecans.

Although plums make brandy, and potatoes make vodka, grapes were a historic source of wine because of high sugars, extensive skins and natural yeast. Other fruit wine was often cheap, too-sweet, homemade booze.

Yet humans love fruit. Even drinkers of grape wines compare a pinot noir to black cherries or a chardonnay to green apples.

The technical problem for pure fruit wines is that each fruit has different levels and kinds of acids, sugars and proteins. The chemistry is complicated, and Marden says old-time makers tried to off-set acid by adding too much sugar. Fruit fermenting is so complicated and unexplored that Shook applied for patents on some processes. "You think you've nailed something and test it in the warehouse. Six months on the shelf and suddenly there's a protein glob in the middle of it. You have to start over."

Then there's skin. Peach fuzz is useless, but blueberry skins have similar tannin, antioxidants and color to a black grape, and can make blueberry wine dry.

Apples transform into wine easily, too. Keel & Curley makes an all-apple wine, as do wineries in New York, Vermont and Canada. Cherry wines have succeeded in New Jersey and Michigan.

Sometimes Marden and other vintners prefer to blend other fruit with grape wines, such as strawberry with riesling, peach with chardonnay and blackberry with zinfandel.

Pure fruit wine with no grapes remains the grail, and Florida Orange Groves leads the league with 180 medals and almost 30 varieties, watermelon, pineapple and blackberry among them. Florida's other pure-fruit specialist is Schnebly Redland's Winery (www.schneblywinery.com; toll-free 1-888-717-9463), which makes wine from the lychee, carambola, mango, guava and passion fruit crops around Homestead.

If chemistry is tough, the goal for Shook is simple.

"There's a huge segment out there who wants a wine with the authentic taste of what it comes from," he said.

Grape lovers who insist they're not sweet on fruit wine will still enjoy a bottle this season.

In cooking, fruit wines reduce to intense flavor for sauces and glazes, make punchy salad dressings and perk up cranberries and cobbler. They can also double as aperitifs and dessert wine.

Or add tangerine to your gravy.

Chris Sherman can be reached at (727) 893-8585 or csherman@sptimes.com.

---

The next squeeze: the pomegranate

The fruit flavor of the decade, the crimson grenade of antioxidant berries, will soon be on shelves as pomegranate wine.

For all its faddish novelty, pomegranate had been on the bar for years in bottles of grenadine.

Look for new pomegranate wines from the Middle East, Rimon from Israel and Tree of Life from Armenia.

Closer to home, Bargetto Winery in California now bottles pomegranate wine. Florida Orange Groves and Winery in South Pasadena will release one in 2008.

[Last modified November 15, 2007, 10:58:53]