United States of Wine

Hula o Maui – Pineapple Sparkling Wine – Non-Vintage

Price: $25.99 – Fine Wine & Good Spirits, Philadelphia, PA

Finding this sparkling wine on a shelf of a wine shop in Philadelphia, I was excited to try this fruit wine from Hawai’i. Hula o Maui makes their sparkling wine from fresh gold pineapples grown on the slopes of Haleakalā, a dormant volcano on the eastern side of Maui.

We poured the wine into regular wine glasses to give ourselves the room to fully take in the scents and flavors of this brut sparkling wine. The wine is beautifully clear, featuring a light yellow-gold hue. The vibrant scent of the wine was like smelling a newly-opened tin can of pineapple slices. There was a whiff of new and slightly metallic undertones, with a scents of sweet pineapple. It’s fairly obvious this was fermented in stainless steel.

The taste surprised me. Perhaps I was expecting fizzy pineapple juice, or something that didn’t taste like pineapple juice at all. What I got was a perfect combination of fizz and light pineapple taste that wasn’t overpowering at all. This definitely wasn’t fizzy juice.

The wine carries a sweet flavor, without it being a sweet wine. But your taste buds can taste the familiar sweetness associated with pineapple. It fills your mouth with delicate, but crisp, flavor.

Hula o Maui makes a very enjoyable sparkling wine, especially if you like pineapples. It’s refreshing to drink, and the fizziness is perfectly in tune with the flavor of the wine. Not too fizzy to be bothersome, like a nice prosecco.

The longer I drank it, though, the familiar acidity on my tongue that one gets from eating fresh pineapple appears. Though nowhere near the level of acidity from actually eating the fruit. Still, it bothered me that the wine gave my tongue any unpleasantness.

At the end of the bottle of this Hawaiian sparking line, we wish we had more. I’m biased because I love pineapples, and could drink of this often. It’s a very good non-traditional wine, and I would recommend (if not demand) trying it if you see it in a local wine shop. I ke ola!

Score: 9.0