My wife has been coping with food allergies and auto-immune diseases for a number of years. She takes a yearly food allergy test and this last week found out that somehow grapes were added to her food allergy list! This is a major bummer for her (and us) as wine is something that we enjoy together. Rotation of foods is the prescribed method of dealing with these allergies so it will be six months before she re-introduces grape wine back into her diet. Although, she has declared that she will consume grape wine on her birthday at the end of the month!

Thankfully, the tenacious brewers of the ages have come up with ways to ferment many things and we will be sampling some of them on Off the Cork. A quick stop at HyVee produced some interesting options including Mead (fermented honey) as well as the expected fruit wines. I stayed away from the Mogen-David/Boone’s Farm wines and tried to focus on some more, shall we say, reputable fruit wines.

Tabor Home Vineyards are located just outside Baldwin, IA and is about an hour drive from Cedar Rapids. Due to their proximity and regional popularity, Tabor Home’s wines are available just about everywhere in Eastern Iowa. In addition to the typical run of reds and whites including some regional varietals (Marechal Foch, for example), they also have some selection of fruit wines and are pretty well known for these sweet temptations.

The wine I brought home is a cherry wine made from locally-grown cherries called amusingly enough Cheery Cherry. The wine is a bright red in the bottle and has a surprisingly tame sweetness to it. We suspect this is supposed to be served chilled, but probably not refrigerated. (Note to self: time to get a wine fridge). We drank it at room temperature which is around 65 degrees this evening.

It reminded Sherry and I of some homemade sweet wines we’ve had in the past– but without the unexpected slap of alcohol or cough-syrupy sweetness that sometimes comes from Uncle Bob’s attempts at fruit wine. The taste isn’t overly complex with a slight bite and consistent flavor. While this wine, in my opinion, has a berry taste I didn’t think it tasted particularly like cherries. This wine goes well with dark chocolate, and future glasses will get a dusting of powdered dark chocolate on the rim– a trick we learned at a tasting we did in 2006 in Minnesota.

Sherry feels that this is a good substitute while she waits to rotate wine back into her diet. We will be buying more of this, but expect some more reviews of grape wine alternatives from us as we try them.

$8.99 at HyVee in Marion.

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