United States of Wine

Bluet – Wild Blueberry Sparkling Wine – Methode Champenoise – 2020

Price: $19.99

It’s July 4, so as I was choosing between red wine or white wine, I decided on this blue wine. A sparkling blueberry wine from Maine!

BLUET makes wine from the blueberries grown in the coastal soils of Maine, where glaciers once covered the land. Two pounds of blueberries are said to have been used in every bottle of wine.

While I do love blueberries, I’ve previously reviewed a blueberry wine from Virginia that I wasn’t fond of. But I wanted to give this Maine wine a real chance.

The wine was dark and opaque, like the purple in the sky just before dawn. The foam had a reddish-purple tinge to it. Though as I poured it into a glass, I got an immediate scent of a wet diaper. Not a great first impression.

I let it sit for a few minutes, and while “wet diaper” didn’t quite go away, I was able to pick up a light scent of fresh pine. It reminded me of walking through a pine forest during the warm summer months, when you could smell the floral growth.

But what I didn’t smell was blueberries. In that moment, it occurred to me that I might not know what blueberries smell like. They’re usually in some baked pastry, or in their sealed skins when fresh. Do blueberries not smell like they taste?

My tasting partner, on the other hand, said this wine reminded him of ketchup. Why ketchup? Then we realized there was an overwhelming scent of vinegar, the same scent that I called “wet diaper.”

Tasting the wine didn’t leave us with a better opinion of this sparking wine. While the wine was tart like blueberries, any fruit flavor was weak. It was overpowered by a vinegar taste that stayed on your tongue long after the wine was gone.

This blueberry sparkling wine was hard to drink. I have now officially declared that blueberries belong in a muffin, not in wine. Sorry, Maine, you tried.

So how do we salvage this wine? Well, it turns out BLUET is aware this wine might be hard to enjoy because on their website, they recommend using their wine as an aperitif or as a mixer in a cocktail. I looked at what ingredients we had, and found what I needed to make a nice sangria. My recipe is at the bottom of this blog.

This review gets two scores: one for the wine itself and one for its use in a cocktail. I couldn’t recommend this wine alone, but it was a delicious addition to the tangy, sweet sangria.

Score (wine alone): 1.8/10

Score (used in my sangria): 7/10

Blueberry Sangria Recipe

Ingredients:

• 4 oz Blueberry Sparkling Wine
• 2 oz Fresh Orange Juice
• 1/2 oz Triple Sec
• Diced apples
• Ginger Ale
• Ice

Instructions:

Add desired amount of ice to 10 oz glass. Drop in a 5-10 pieces of a diced apple. Add wine, orange juice and triple sec, and stir. Top off glass with ginger ale. Slowly stir. Enjoy! (Makes 1)