For Those Who Like Their History a Tad Fruity
When I was in college, some friends took me to my first ever Renaissance Faire. In Kentucky. You haven’t experienced odd until you’ve been lambasted by a lusty serving wench faking a British accent through a thick, Appalachian-Kentucky drawl.
Hearing of Hill Top Berry Farm and Winery’s fondness for historical honey meads, a little part of me worried that I was in for a similar experience. Luckily that wasn’t the case. It’s a good-sized tasting; this trip we got to sample 4 fruit wines and a whopping 8 meads. They did food pairings with some of the tastings. Some were successful, some were not.
The fruit wines were pretty decent: two blackberry wines (one sweeter, one tarter), an apple wine (softly sweet and pleasant), and a cherry wine (described as cherry pie in a glass, and they ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie). But let’s be honest. The unusual offerings are the honey meads.
As with anything else, there were highlights and lowlights among the meads. The Rockfish River Cyser is made from apples and fermented honey. It’s actually very light, pleasant, and (duh) tasted of apples. The Blueberry Melomel is made from blueberries and honey and is a great balance of sweet and tart. Props to them, by the way, for sourcing all Virginia blueberries. Other Virginia wineries that offer blueberry wines are bringing in fruit from New Jersey and even Maine. So go you guys! The other standout was Dragon’s Blood, a pomegranate melomel with huge tart flavor at first glance that mellows a good bit with the second sip.
We didn’t love the Blue Ridge Mountain Mead, the very traditional straight honey mead. I don’t drink enough of this type of thing to articulate what I didn’t dig,so I’ll leave it up to VA Wine Diva in the comments.I also didn’t love the Pounding Branch Persimmon Melomel, but I should qualify this. I had my first persimmon ever in the fall of ’08, and haven’t felt the need to have one since. Pokemon,persimmons, golf, and Justin Bieber- all things I just don’t get the appeal of. Sorry.
Hilltop charges an exceptionally reasonable $2 tasting fee that gets applied towards any purchase, so if you’re intrigued by fruit wines or historical honey meads- what do you have to lose? Go for it!
The For Those Who Like Their History a Tad Fruity by Swirl, Sip, Snark, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
I’ll be the first to admit that fruit wines aren’t really my thing. I admire a good one, but I rarely want to open one. If fun fruit wines are your thing, or appealing to someone you’re one a wine tour with a stop at Hill Top might make sense to work in. I was, however, more interested in the meads. The cyser was my favorite, but I’ve had very little experience with mead, so the lack of familiarity might be why others weren’t appealing to me. Finally, props to them for using local fruit when possible. People making wine with fruit other than grapes should be concerned with keeping it a VA product as well.
… then I’ll be the second to admit that fruit wines aren’t my thing either. The fact that they’re using local fruit is a big plus in my book. Perhaps I’m sensory challenged, but I’ve never been a fan of the meads… maybe I need to try more of them.
It really does bug me when wineries import fruit for their fruit wines – we shouldn’t hold those producers to a different standard than we do for those who make grape wines.