Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, Queenston, ON, Canada
Web: Queenston Lewiston Duty Free
Phone: 905.262.5363
Rating:
[learn more]See More Restaurant Reviews For:
Alcohol Drinks Loganberry Strawberry
"Heavy in honey and mead taste, the presence of alcohol gives Strawberry Shadows a sharp, almost spicy tingle as you drink, and there's nothing syrupy about the consistency."
It's probably our shortest Bubbly column yet, and for good reason: having spent weeks reviewing all sorts of Western New York fruit wines, we've sorted through the good, the great, and the not so hot - this week's one of the not so hot ones. We picked two local strawberry wines, plus one national brand of loganberry wine, purely out of curiosity, and the results were some of the most disappointing we've yet had. All three of the wines rated in 1.5-star territory, so we'll just briefly tell you about each of them.
Let's start with the odd man out: the Maneschewitz Loganberry Wine ($4/750ml). The price is crazy cheap, the brand is known for being Kosher, sweet, and decent, and the only reason we bothered with this was to see whether there was actually a good alcoholic version of our beloved Loganberry Drink. Maneschewitz pitches this as "a hearty red wine bursting with the flavors and aromas of fresh Loganberries," and frankly, that was enough to appeal to us.
To cut to the chase, this isn't the only loganberry wine out there, but it's definitely not very good: look closely on the label and you'll see that it's actually a grape wine with entirely artificial loganberry flavor. Worse yet, we couldn't discern anything even vaguely loganberry-like in the taste; it had less body than the standard grape Maneschewitz wine, typically high sugar content, and a unpleasant bitter aftertaste. We wouldn't buy it again.
That brings us to the strawberry wines. We've previously reviewed a blueberry wine from Earle Estates Meadery, a Penn Yan, New York-based winery that specializes in honey wines, also known as meads. Local shops such as Premier carry Strawberry Shadows ($10/750ml), which like the blueberry version is billed as a "semi-sweet wine" even though the sweetness would be off the charts for fans of drys and semi-drys; this one is made from 70% honey mead and 30% strawberry wine - a heavier balance of mead to fruit wine than the blueberry - and only slightly lower alcohol content at 9% versus the blueberry's 10%.
Like the loganberry wine above, this one has barely any of the real fruit flavor you'd expect from the name: the bottle is clearly heavier on the shadows than the strawberries. Heavy in honey and mead taste, the presence of alcohol gives Strawberry Shadows a sharp, almost spicy tingle as you drink, and there's nothing syrupy about the consistency - its only positive relative to the Hernder alternative below. In our view, Shadows isn't as good as the Earle blueberry wine that we similarly found only passable, but the winery also apparently makes a fully strawberry version that we haven't been able to find. We may give it a try in the future.
Or perhaps not, if strawberry wines are all like these. We went into St. Catherines, Canada-based Hernder Estates' Iced Strawberry ($15 CDN/200ml) with the same high hopes that we'd had for its predecessor, the Iced Raspberry, reviewed here: the raspberry flavor was unquestionably intense, so we'd hoped that the Iced Strawberry would prove a sharp contrast with the weakly flavored Strawberry Shadows and Loganberry Wines we'd previously been sipping. And once again, Hernder impressed on the packaging - it bottles the equivalent of two small glasses of wine in a tall, gold wax-tipped bottle that gives every impression of being fancy. Anyone who received one of these bottles, available at the Canadian Queenston Lewiston Duty Free shop on the Canada side of the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, would initially be impressed by the gesture.
Unfortunately, Hernder disappointed with what's inside: the expensive bottle was like drinking almost pure sugar syrup, with a vague smell but no obvious taste of strawberries, and an unpleasantly artificial aftertaste that was like saccharin. It's apparently not for a lack of strawberry ingredients: Hernder claims that it uses fresh strawberries that were pressed into a concentrate and then fermented, but at least in the bottle we sampled, it might as well have not gone through the effort - simple syrup with a similar 8% alcohol content would have been more fun to drink.
In sum, this week's recommendations on strawberry and loganberry wines are "pass, pass, pass." We'll be looking out for better options for upcoming editions of Bubbly; until then, look back at our past Western New York fruit wine picks for some decidedly better choices.
