Strawberry Wine

Earlier this year we tried some of last year's strawberry wine. What pleased us about it was its not-so-strawberryish nature --

Limpid, faintly aromatic, delicate of flavor, with an edge of tang to its dryness.

This last Sunday morning I went looking for a breakfast wine, and thought that with the strawberries in the yard blooming and beginning their fruiting, I should bring up from the basement a bit of strawberry. I found a goodly many bottles of a particular batch, and emerged with a liter in hand. Decanted, it had an amber-tinted red-fruit color, with a definite strawberry smell. The taste was a bit toward the sweeter end of the spectrum, with typical strawberry flavor dominating.

While this wine towered above our strawberry wines of the year before, it was not quite what we wanted to be drinking, beyond the first half-glass or so, on a Sunday morning.

I checked in our records, where I discovered that this batch was a cooked wine. The wine that we started immediately afterwards, however, was a raw-fruit wine. That must have been the one we had tasted and found satisfying, earlier in the year.

Last summer the idea was taking firmer root in our minds that cooked wines were the sort we would rather not drink -- while raw wines offered the prospect of pleasing drinking. And here we had given ourselves a chance for a clear comparison ...

Cheers ...