United States of Wine

Bear Creek Winery – Red, White and Blueberry – N/V

Price: $25 – Bear Creek Winery – Homer, Alaska

Let me start with expressing how amazing my coworkers are at my daily job. When a conference this summer was in Anchorage, Alaska, I asked for a bottle of Alaskan wine to make it back in their checked luggage.

So this is how I came to find myself tasting this blend of blueberry, rhubarb and grape wine from Bear Creek Winery in Homer, Alaska. Because of the cold climate, traditional wine grapes, like Vitis vinifera, cannot be grown outdoors in Alaska. But several wine producers make wine from the local fruits.

Bear Creek’s Red, White and Blueberry wine has a specific blend of 60% strawberry, 20% rhubarb and 20% blueberry wines. The combination provides an excessively sweet scent to the wine, like a homemade mixed berry jam.

It poured into the wine glass as a light pale rust red liquid, the color of Robitussin cough syrup. Never before have I hoped that a wine taste better than it looked.

The taste of this wine was surprising, but not necessarily a good surprise. But not a bad surprise either. What I found was slightly tart strawberry Kool-Aid. Not as super sweet as Kool-Aid could be though, as if made by a parent who didn’t use enough sugar. As my drinking partner said, “It’s like watered-down Kool-Aid, but I don’t hate Kool-Aid.’

This wine is too easy to drink because of it’s juice-like feel, which could lead to a bad day with its 11% ABV. Less of a sipping wine and more of a gulper, one would find themselves drunker more quickly than intended.

While this blueberry-rhubarb wine is better than most of the other American fruit wines I’d tasted, it felt like a waste of a wine glass. This could be poured into a paper cup being held in the same hand as a lit cigarette, and it still would do it justice.

But in the end, this strawberry and watermelon-flavored alcoholic juice lacked depth. There was no excitement to it. It could’ve benefitted from being paired with some form of enhancement, perhaps a sparkling wine to make an interesting mimosa.

Would I drink this wine again? Not if I could help it. But I am now curious about Bear Creek’s other wines, just because this wine was much better than the blueberry wines from Virginia and Maine. Do I appreciate my coworker from bringing this wine to me for this review? Absolutely!

Score: 4.8/10