- Publish Date: Oct 20, 2010
Wine Of The Week
An 'A' for effort on this Wisconsin-made pumpkin wine.
You can make wine out of just about any fruit. If it's ripe enough you can mash it up, ferment it, bottle it and--if you dare--drink it. So when we heard that Three Lakes Winery in Wisconsin produces a pumpkin wine, we knew we had to try it since Halloween is right around the corner.
The wine is made by fermenting a puree of pie pumpkins--ones that are grown for eating, not decoration--before it's filtered and bottled. The result is a dark, golden-colored wine that smells, well, sort of like a pumpkin after you've carved it and displayed it on the front porch for a few days. The aromas are...pungent.
On the palate, however, the wine is pleasantly semisweet if one-dimensional, but is definitely fun and drinkable. Believe it or not, we can think of a half-dozen other $10 wines we've tried recently that tasted worse--and those were actually made from grapes. The back label recommends heating the pumpkin wine with mulling spices, which seems like a pretty good idea.
Is pumpkin wine a great, new discovery? No, but Three Lakes deserves credit for having the courage to try and produce pumpkin wine--never mind one that's more natural than the treats most people consume at this time of year. So Three Lakes Pumpkin is our Wine of the Week. You can find the wine here.
What's the weirdest wine you've ever tried? Tell us about it below.
