United States of Wine

4e Winery — Prairie Star — American White Blend — 2023 — Mapleton, South Dakota

Price: $22; https://4ewinery.com/

Did you know wine is made in South Dakota? Well, now you do. We had the opportunity to taste 4e Winery’s Prairie Star, a white blend. The cold-weather grapes were sourced from a nearby vineyard in Western Minnesota.

At room temperature, this wine bottle had a lot of sediment floating in it. Like, a LOT of sediment. But as the wine cooled in the refrigerator, the sediment settled to the bottom and mostly stayed there.

I really wanted to like this wine, as I thought about how a winemaker was able to create this in a part of the country that isn’t known for it’s grapes. The scent of this wine gave us the impression that this wine could be good. We could smell white flowers, steel and a hint of luxury lipstick.

Unfortunately, this wine had a far better scent than taste. We were met with a bitter soy sauce flavor and something that tasted a little bit like gravy. As the wine breathed a little, the taste of a green vegetable came through, like edamame. It was a bitter flavor indeed.

The more we drank from our glasses, the more we realized we couldn’t drink more of it. Joining the edamame and bitter soy sauce flavors was the zest of what tasted like half a lemon left uncovered in the fridge for a week, next to old Thanksgiving gravy. And that flavor stayed in your mouth far longer than you wanted it to.

We tried to drink it again the following day, after 24 hours of breathing. We found it to have mellowed a bit, and no longer tasted the intense bitterness or gravy. It was slightly more tolerable, a wine we could actually drink, but just didn’t want to.

We also have a red wine from the same winery we will drink at a later date, with estate-grown grapes. We’re holding out hope for that, but this white wine is not one we can recommend.

Score: 2.5/10